Norman Rockwell

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Eric J. Segal

Despite his distinction as a popular painter of everyday life, Norman Rockwell has, for much of the twentieth century, represented a point of controversy concerning the definition of art and the nature of American culture itself. Although a sizable public embraced the illustrator as America's greatest painter, others have reviled his work as vacuous commercial art depicting a highly restricted spectrum of the national makeup. Rockwell's prominence and the prevailing conception of advocates and critics alike--that his task was to represent America--largely issued from his long association with the popular magazine, the Saturday Evening Post. Even when, in the last decades of his life, Rockwell undertook assignments challenging the conservative cultural values of the Post--values which were mistakenly ascribed to the illustrator as well--his apparently unselfconscious, realistic style remained out of step with contemporary artistic practices. By the end of the twentieth century, he was widely recognized as a highly successful illustrator though not as an artist, his name serving as a shorthand term for the values of small-town America that he so often depicted.

Rockwell himself enjoyed the pleasant irony that, this reputation notwithstanding, he was born--on February 3, 1894--in the paramount metropolis of New York City. Although his father's family had once held substantial wealth and his mother took great pride in an English aristocratic ancestry, by the time of Norman Percevel's birth the family's fortune and status had both declined. Rockwell recalled growing up in modest circumstances, and described episodes of acute embarrassment in the face of his own social indiscretions which, he thought, bespoke his lower-middle-class background. Still, his family remained respectably pious, to the extent that Norman and his younger brother Jarvis were conscripted into the church choir by their parents. This religiosity, however, did not stick, and as an adult Rockwell would decline to attend church services.

In his autobiography, Rockwell described a boyhood full of anxieties and punctuated by numerous unpleasant episodes. Amongst his friends he stood out as an awkward and pigeon-toed boy, his face dominated by large, round eyeglasses that earned him the despised nickname "Mooney." He nonetheless participated in all the games and pranks of his neighborhood playmates including, as he later recalled with contrition, incidents of bigoted name-calling. Urban encounters with indigent drunks and rancorous couples enhanced, by contrast, his cherished memories of summer trips away from the city. He would later characterize his early interest in drawing as a compensatory practice that won him admiration from his peers.

As a high school freshman, Rockwell began taking weekly leave in order to attend the Chase School of Art on a part-time basis (c. 1908), and in his sophomore year he left altogether, becoming a full-time student at the National Academy of Design at the age of 15. Finding the academy's program "stiff and scholarly," he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York in 1910. There he devoted himself to the study of the human figure and illustration under instructors George Bridgman and Thomas Fogarty.

Like his fellow students, Rockwell admired and identified with the work of prominent American illustrators such as Howard Pyle and Edward Austin Abbey, particularly their inspiring attention to historically accurate detail and compelling visual narratives. At the same time he esteemed the expressive qualities and technical virtuosity of painters from Rembrandt and Vermeer to Whistler and Picasso. Although modernist practices held little interest for Rockwell in his own art--excepting some brief experiments in the 1920s--neither he nor his peers saw much distinction between the fine arts and illustration. They did, however, disdain other, debased spheres of artistic practice. Rockwell wrote that he and his peers "signed our names in blood, swearing never to prostitute our art, never to do advertising jobs." But the nature of the field of illustration itself was in transition with the proliferation of cheap illustrated magazines (which needed advertisers who in turn needed illustrators), the increasing use of photography, and the demise of handsomely decorated books which had seen their zenith during the so-called Golden Age of Illustration. Rockwell's own practice would soon include the production of successful and highly sought after advertising illustrations.

His first inroads into a professional career included illustrating a didactic children's book called Tell Me Why Stories. Landing the position of contributing art director for Boy's Life in 1913, Rockwell soon developed a reputation as the "Boy Illustrator," referring both to his young age and his favored subjects rendered for an emerging group of youth magazines. These popular magazines, including St. Nicholas, American Boy, and Youth's Companion, were intended to entertain white, middle-class adolescents and promote the same ideals of American citizenry embodied in the Boy Scouts and the Young Men's Christian Association movements. But Rockwell sought a more distinguished venue for his art.