Last Saturday was my birthday, and Rose Ann and I, along with our friends Sue and Bill, celebrated by going to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. The museum has a collection of Rockwell’s originals and examples of works by other 20^th century illustrators.  

Norman Rockwell was the most successful American illustrator of the 20^th century. He created more than 4,000 oil paintings, illustrated over 40 books, and numerous magazine illustrations, calendars, advertisements and logos. But he is best known for his 321covers for The Saturday Evening Post.  He painted the first in 1916, when he was 22 years old, and continued for the next 47 years.

Many of The Saturday Evening Post covers, especially the early ones, were successfully humorous depictions of small-town America. They are like photo realistic cartoons. Many are reminiscent of movies from the same decades and at times they are sentimental and cute. For example, Rockwell created four recurring characters, four young boys, who engaged in various humorous exploits. These covers remind me of the Little Rascals movies that I watched on TV when I was young.

Because of the fame of his Post covers, “Norman Rockwell’s America” is often cited by conservatives as the bucolic vision of American that they want to return to. This has always irked me, because Rockwell was anything but conservative. Recently on MSNOW, I heard a commentator complaining about this same issue. Then she added, “Norman Rockwell was not conservative; in the 60s he got WOKE.” She was referring to the illustrations on the theme of integration that Rockwell made for Look Magazine in the early 1960s. These are some of his most famous paintings, and we will return to them later. But I would add that his themes were always liberal, and he always championed the common man and the underdog.    

Here is an example, a Post cover for the New Year in 1945. Instead of depicting the celebration, Rockwell chose to depict the plight of the waiter tasked with cleaning up the mess the next morning. Rockwell traveled to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and used the Wedgewood Room as the sight and the actual waiter, Anton Ashenbrenner, posed as the model.  

In another example, in two consecutive covers he made for Boy’s Life in the 1930s, he depicted three boys going fishing and then for the next issue returning with their catch. Obviously, he is taking the side of the poor boys over the rich kid with the expensive equipment.

Some of his most memorial paintings are the ones that he made for the war effort during World War II. In 1942, Rockwell was working for the Ordnance Department of the Army, when he was inspired by FDR’s speech on the Four Freedoms, the four truths that characterize liberty and that we were fighting a war to preserve. He decided he would illustrate the Four Freedoms. While attending a town meeting in Vermont he witnessed one man stand up in the meeting and express a minority viewpoint, and yet everyone in the room listened to him with respect. Rockwell realized that this was Freedom of speech in action, and he had the subject for his first painting. This was the one that he felt was most successful.

Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear soon followed, and the illustrations were published in consecutive issues of the Saturday Evening Post. The magazine received thousands of requests for reprints of the paintings, Because of their popularity, the Post and the Dept. of Treasury jointly issued war bonds and stamps with Rockwell’s images. It was the most successful money raising campaign of the war. The four large canvases are now displayed in the central domed ceiling room in the Museum, one to each of the four directions, like a temple of freedom.        

For Freedom from Want Rockwell depicted a Thanksgiving dinner. As with many of his paintings, his friends and neighbors posed for him.

Freedom from Fear depicts parents tucking their children into bed. The black curtain in the background is a blackout curtain, designed to protect the home from bombings. This is a detail often missed by modern viewers.  

Freedom of Religion seems the least like a painting in Rockwell’s style. There is no story represented. Also, although it is meant to depict a verity of religions the three main characters in the forefront of the canvas represent, from right to left, Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism: all religions of the Bible. The rest of the world is not represented.

He made up for this oversight, however, in his 1961 Saturday Evening Post cover, “The Golden Rule,” which he felt best reflected his person philosophy. Here is what he said about the painting:

“I had tried to depict all the peoples of the world, gathered together. That is just what I wanted to express about the Golden Rule.”

During the war, Rockwell also championed the role of women workers with his depiction of “Rosie the Riveter.”  The name Rosie the Riveter came from a popular 1942 song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, but the famous poster that is now the most recognizable image of Rose was not actually tiled “Rosie the Riveter.”  The poster of the female worker with a red polka dotted bandana was painted in 1942 by J. Howard Miller for the Westing House Company’s war production factory. It was called “We Can Do It.”  It was only displayed in the factory, and nowhere else. It was only in the 1980s that it was rediscovered and became a feminist icon.  

In 1943, Rockwell designed a Saturday Evening Post Memorial Day cover depicting, with his characteristic sense of humor, a brawny Rosie taking a lunch break in front of the American Flag. With her right foot she steps on Hitler’s Mein Kamph. Her pose is actually based on Michelangelo’s painting of the Prophet Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Rockwell’s version was seen by millions of people during the war.   

Now let’s return to Rockwell’s illustrations for Look Magazine in the 1960s. The first, “The Problem We All Live With,” 1964, is probably one of his most famous paintings. After the Brown v. The Board of Education ruling, schools in the South were ordered to desegregate. The last state to comply was Louisiana. In November 1950 four black girls were escorted into an all-white school in New Orleans against the wishes of an angry crowd. Rockwell chose to depict one of the small black children being guided past raciest graffiti and a splattered tomato by four US marshals.   
 

Rockwell made a study of the girl’s head. He used Lynda Gunn, a relative of the actual student, as a model.

In 1967, Rockwell created “New Kids in the Neighborhood,” using children again to depict integration in the suburbs.

One of his most startling illustrations depicts the murder of civil rights workers in Mississippi. For this 1965 illustration he was influenced by Goya’s “The Third of May 1808.” The Magazine chose to publish the black and white preliminary drawing instead of the finished oil painting.  
 

In 1969, The Colorado River Storage Project commissioned Rockwell, as well as other illustrators, to create a series of paintings depicting the Glen Canion Dam. Rockwell said that he was not a landscape painter, but realizing that the dam was displacing local Navajos and flooding their sacred ground, he chose to humanize the picture by adding a Navajo family contemplating the dam. The painting is displayed in the same room in the museum with the Look Magazine paintings. 
 

In 2025, the Trump Department of Homeland Security used several of Rockwell’s paintings in social medial posts promoting their anti-immigration policy. The Rockwell family denounced their action in an article in USA Today. They wrote, “If Norman Rockwell were alive today, he would be devastated to see that his own work has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.”