BACKTRACKING
Norman Rockwell,
Illustrating America
by Terry Hogan
It was a Sunday. My wife was restless.
She said she wanted to do something to mark the weekend as being
different than the week. I
thought, well there was grass mowing, car washing, cleaning gutters, and trying
to keep the landscaping from turning into a jungle. But I was pretty sure that wasn't what she was talking
about. So, I responded with a cautious
and neutral "Oh?"
That was enough. I had a choice between going to a museum or going to another
museum. Being keenly insightful, I
chose a museum. It was the
Indianapolis Children's Museum. It has a special exhibit on Norman Rockwell. I
wasn't expecting much. I knew who
he was. He was the guy that did
the homey Midwestern illustrations for Post.
I was wrong. It was fascinating.
I never took the time to study the illustrations. Each cover was a one
page story. Each cover was loaded with intricate details. And not readily apparent in any one
illustration, but with a little prompting from the exhibit, I began to see the
same characters reappear in the Post covers. I learned that many of the folks who appeared were not only
real subjects, but were also friends, neighbors, his children, and even Norman
Rockwell, himself. In a few of the
covers, if you look carefully in crowd scenes, you may, in fact, see the same
face twice. He painted in a small
town in Vermont and had a limited population to draw from for models. Some of
the settings were from the same Vermont town. A barber shop, a mechanic shop, and others were real
representations down to the smallest details.
During WWII, Norman Rockwell found a local model
who apparently seemed to personify, at least to Rockwell, the young American
male going off to war. He was
known as Willie Gillis for the magazine cover, but he was really Robert Buck, a
young man that Rockwell met at a square dance in Arlington, Vermont. He first
appeared on the cover of the Post on October 14, 1941 and could be found on
about eight covers during the war. However, Rockwell lost his military
model. Buck joined the Navy and
went to war.
If you have some old Post magazines in the attic
or basement, dig them out. You
probably won't look at too many before you find a dog or two. Most of the time the dog looks pretty
familiar, although on some covers he seems to have longer hair than in
others. It was Norman's dog. Compare the faces from cover to
cover. Look at the details in the
paintings.
Now what I'd like to do is to plaster the paper
with digital copies of the illustrations to show examples of what I'm talking
about. But I dare not. Stuff is copyrighted and I think the
Post publishers are bigger than the Zephyr publisher. So the best I can do is to sprinkle some photos of the
exhibit where photography was explicitly allowed and hope that keeps us out of
trouble.
Do you remember how long Norman Rockwell brought
little glimpses of how we were, or at least how we wanted us to be? His first illustration appeared on the
Post cover on May 20, 1916 ("The Carriage"). It was a scene of a young lad pushing a
wicker pram. He was complete with
a hat, coat and tie, and a baby bottle sticking out of his coat pocket. Some other lads about his age, either
going to or coming from a baseball game, were having some sport with his
assignment. His last cover was the Egyptian President Nasser, published on May
25, 1963.
Excluding the portraits of famous leaders that
he was encouraged to do toward the end of his relationship with Post; his
covers told a story that was pretty obvious if we looked a little. Some were funny. Some were poignant.
Sometimes there were stories behind the story. For example the November 4, 1939 Post cover showed a small
town sheriff sitting on a chair, just outside a jail cell. He is holding a
rifle across his lap and there is a dog at his feet. A young man is playing a
harmonica, standing on the other side of the jail cell bars. The hidden story
is that the sheriff model was, in fact, the local deputy sheriff, Harvey McKee
who also was a Rockwell neighbor in Arlington, Vermont. Harvey posed for the
painting while suffering from a broken collar bone and a broken left hand. The swelling of the broken left hand is
clearly visible in the painting, if you only take the time to look closely.
It has been suggested that Rockwell is best
known for the "Four Freedoms" illustrations he did for Post covers in
1943. They sold a lot of magazines
and were reprinted and widely distributed. The Four Freedoms, each illustration with its own cover,
were Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from
Fear. They were obviously the right themes for the time, when America was
fighting in Europe and in the Pacific.
But as much as Rockwell is none for the Post
covers, he did quite a bit of other work.
If you look carefully, you may find Rockwell's illustrations in Mark
Twain's Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn (Heritage Press).
Rockwell also did some commercial art for advertising for such companies
as Fisk Tires, Interwoven Socks and Capitol Boilers. He also did a painting for
20th Century-Fox of the actress Jennifer Jones as Bernadette in the movie The
Song of Bernadette. It was widely distributed to market the
movie and appeared in magazines, newspapers, and theater posters.
It has hard to figure out my favorite painting
used in a Post Magazine cover. I'm
a new Rockwell fan and perhaps my choice will change over time, like learning
to admire drier wines with experience.
But right now, my favorite Norman Rockwell has to be the March 6, 1954
("Girl at the Mirror") cover.
It is a beautiful painting of a young girl sitting on a footstool,
looking into a mirror at herself.
She is pensive, and pretty, with signs of a beauty yet to unfold. On her lap is a page of a magazine
showing some adult attractive woman.
It is clear why the young girl is studying her image so intently in the
mirror. The image is all the
stronger by Rockwell's use of a bright light on the girl's image and her
mirrored reflection and a darken background that emphasizes the focus of the
subject.
If you ever hear someone, or even yourself, say
that Rockwell was not an artist, but rather only an illustrator, go find the
March 6, 1954 Post cover.
I guess my wife had a pretty good idea after
all. It certainly did separate the
weekend from the week. I learned,
once again, how little I paid attention to my environment when I was young. I guess I was busy doing at the cost of
seeing. As they said, "It is
too bad that youth is wasted on the young." Perhaps Rockwell missed a good theme for a cover.
If you are interested in seeing the Rockwell
exhibit, it is at the Indianapolis Children's Museum located on North Meridian
in Indianapolis. From Galesburg, find I-74 and go east about 250 miles and stop
when you hit Indianapolis. The exhibit runs through the end of the year.
If you can't make Indianapolis, but would like
to see what I'm writing about, I've provided some good references with both
excellent text and photos on Norman Rockwell's illustrations of America. But I should warn you, it may make a
change in how you see. Last
weekend, I saw a Norman Rockwell cover topic along I-74. It was a new shiny SUV with a new
expensive boat and trailer, sitting along the side of the road. The right trailer tire had gone flat
and the driver had continued to run on it. The tire was shredded. The thrill of the new SUV, boat and
trailer had turned into a forlorn owner, sitting on the side of the road,
apparently without a spare.
There is a Rockwell illustration waiting just
around the next corner, but you need to take the time to see and
appreciate. Life is just a Post
Cover.
References
Anon. 1976. Norman Rockwell and The Saturday
Evening Post.
No publisher or publication date given, but copyrighted by both Post and Four S
Productions, Inc. in 1976.
Finch, Christoper.1978. 102 Favorite
Paintings by Norman Rockwell.
Crown Publishers, Inc. N.Y.
Guptill, Arthur. 1946. Norman Rockwell Illustrator. Watson-Guptill
Publications. N.Y.