Norman Rockwell - America's Artist

By Roger Frost


N Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 - November 8, 1978) was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator. His works enjoy a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine for more than four decades. Using humor and a unique style Rockwell chronicled every facet of American life and culture at the Saturday Post.

America's most beloved illustrator had a record-breaking museum tour in 2000, delighting audiences and irritating snobs. He purposely painted one less Saturday Evening Post cover than his idol, JC Leyendcker, 324 and painted for the humor Life, St. Nicholas, Boys Life, Youth's Companion, Literary Digest, American Weekly and ads and poster work for Budweiser, Fisk, Crest, Interwoven, Edison, Boy Scouts, Jell-o, 20th Century Fox, RKO, and many others. No other illustrator remains in the public eye through calendars, reprints, monographs, and collectibles as does Rockwell.

Rockwell really wanted to work for the Saturday Evening Post and in March 1916 he visited its main office in Philadelphia. He showed the editor, George Horace Lorimer, a collection of front cover ideas. Lorimer was so impressed with the work that he purchased two cover pictures and commissioned three more. This was the start of his long-term relationship with the magazine that was to last over 45 years.

Rockwell considered himself as a commercial illustrator, not an artist. Although his vast body of work has often been dismissed or stereotyped, Rockwell remains one of 20th-century America's most enduring and popular artists. Now, more than one hundred years after his birth, he is achieving a new level of recognition and respect around the world.

In 1907 the family moved to Mamaroneck , a small settlement on the Long Island Sound . Rockwell went to the local school but travelled the 25 miles to Manhatten to study at the the New York School of Art , an institution run by the artist, William Merritt Chase . In 1909, at the age of 15, he left high school and enrolled in the National Academy School . Rockwell found the teaching at the academy very conventional and in 1910 he joined the Art Students League. With teachers such as Thomas Eakins, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Art Young, George Luks, Boardman Robinson, George Bellows, Howard Pyle and Augustus Saint-Gaudens , it developed a reputation for progressive teaching methods and radical politics. At this time it had nearly a thousand students and was considered the most important art school in the country.

Many people loved his coming and going paintings. The two paintings hung above and below each other, contrasting a high-spirited family driving to somewhere, like the lake, on a hot summer day, and the horrible ride back. The second painting is the same car as the first, but going the other way, with the wrung-out dregs of the same family -- some of them slumping, sleeping or carsick, and barely visible. Norman's father, Waring Rockwell, worked in the textile industry. He was also an amateur artist and spent time with his son copying illustrations out of magazines. Waring also read to his family the novels of Charles Dickens. While he read, Norman drew the characters from the novels.




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