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Norman Rockwell was born in New York on 3rd February, 1894. Rockwell enjoyed drawing and decided he wanted to be an artist at an early age. He studied at Chase Art School, the National Academy of Design and the Arts Students League. While a student he began having his drawings published in Boys' Life magazine. Rockwell's editor was so impressed by his work and made him art director of the magazine.

Rockwell's ambition was to produce a painting used on the front-cover of the Saturday Evening Post. In March 1916 he travelled to Philadelphia to see George Horace Lorimer, the editor of the magazine. When Lorimer saw his work he immediately accepted two covers and commissioned three more. This was the start of his long-term relationship with the magazine that was to last over 45 years.

Soon after the United States entered the First World War, Rockwell joined the US Navy. Over the next year Rockwell worked for US Navy publications as well as supplying paintings for the Saturday Evening Post.

After the Armistice Rockwell returned to full-time illustrating. As well as magazine work, Rockwell became involved in designing advertising campaigns. The quality of his art-work was recognised by the Milwaukee Art Institute, when it became the first major museum to give him his first one-man show.

 

Norman Rockwell, US government poster (1945)

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt made his 1941 address to Congress setting out the "four essential human freedoms" Rockwell decided to paint images of those freedoms for the Saturday Evening Post. These paintings were finished and published in 1943. The paintings portrayed Freedom of Worship, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Want and Freedom from Fear. These pictures became extremely popular and reprints of the covers were sold in vast quantities.

The federal government decided to take the original paintings of the Four Freedoms on a national tour to help sell war bonds. Over the next few weeks the paintings were seen by 1,222,000 people and were instrumental in selling $132,992,539 worth of bonds. During the Second World War Rockwell also produced posters for the military.

After the war Rockwell continued to provide illustrations for magazines but also designed posters for Hollywood movies, commemorative stamps for the Post Office and illustrated books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Rockwell had the last of his 317 covers for Saturday Evening Post in December, 1963. The magazine decided to abandon paintings on its front cover but Rockwell soon found new work with other magazines such as Look and McCall's.

In his later years Rockwell became more political. His painting Southern Justice (1964) records the murder of the civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. Whereas The Problem We All Live With (1965) dealt with segregated education in the United States. Norman Rockwell died on 8th November, 1978.

Norman Rockwell, Saturday Evening Post(1949)

 

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(1) Jonathan Jones, Home of the Brave, The Guardian (19th February, 2002)

Rockwell's idyllic Thanksgiving is one of four paintings he made in 1943 to illustrate America's Four Freedoms, to spur his countrymen on in the second world war. They were published in the Saturday Evening Post and the canvases went on a national tour, during which they were seen by over a million people and were credited with selling $132m worth of war bonds. Rockwell's Four Freedoms have lived in the national imagination ever since. Freedom from Want - the Thanksgiving scene - is the most famous, perhaps because Rockwell rightly anticipated that the future of America would be one of galloping prosperity. The others are Freedom of Speech, in which a blue-collar guy gets up to speak at a town meeting and is heard with respect; Freedom to Worship, depicting people of different faiths praying together; and Freedom from Fear, with a couple tucking their children up in bed, the man holding a paper with news of bombing raids in Europe, knowing that here in America no air raid siren will split the night. Rockwell later said he didn't feel quite happy with Freedom from Fear - it was, he said, "based on a rather smug idea" that Americans were safe from external attack.

Rockwell would have loved being recognised as a serious artist. But he might have been uncomfortable with any suggestion that he was an unquestioning flag-waver, cheering George Bush to the next stage in the war against terrorism. He was not blind to America's flaws, even though his art might dream of the way things should be. In the 1960s he was shocked by the violence of the South towards civil rights campaigners. His picture Southern Justice records the murder of activists in Mississippi. It's very different from the cute image of a white boy served by a black waiter on a train that he had painted in 1946. Rockwell claimed that when he worked for the Post its editor "told me never to show coloured people except as servants".

After he parted company with the magazine in 1963, Rockwell became more openly political, and the politics were not what people might have expected; indeed one of the many American artists who chronicled the breakup of Norman Rockwell's idyllic mid-century America was Norman Rockwell. Rockwell's 1960s pictures are images of tension and conflict. The Problem We All Live With (1963) has a little girl walking to a newly desegregated school with an escort of four US marshals. It adopts her scale, dwarfed by the huge legs of the marshals. On the wall behind is vile racist graffiti and the blood-red remains of a thrown tomato. Rockwell was accused by angry letter writers of "vicious lying propaganda... for the crime of racial integration".

 

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