Ex Libris: Norman Rockwell

In this article in our ‘Ex Libris’ series, we meet the illustrator who told his stories with paint and palette.

"Young Lawyer," 1927, by Norman Rockwell. Public Domain

Of all American painters, Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) is surely the best-known and most-loved. Talent and decades of providing illustrations for such magazines as Boy’s Life and The Saturday Evening Post won him this place in the annals of American culture.

Though some critics don’t considered him a real artist but an illustrator—Rockwell himself proudly adopted that title—the fact remains that many of us easily recognize and take pleasure in his work: the scenes set in barbershops and doctor’s offices, the joy and humor so often found in his sentimental paintings of people and situations, his consummate skill with a brush, and his clear love for his country.

Rockwell enthusiasts are also attracted by the stories he told, not with words but with paint. Take, for instance, one well-known composition, “Girl at Mirror.” Rockwell gives us a barefoot girl in a white slip, seated and staring into a mirror with her back to viewers and with a magazine featuring a movie star in her lap. The doll beneath the mirror has been put aside, replaced with the tools of beauty—lipstick, comb, brush. Childhood has vanished, and the girl, clearly wondering whether she will be as beautiful as the woman in the magazine, gazes not only into a mirror but into the future of her womanhood.

"Girl at Mirror," 1954, by Norman Rockwell. Oil on canvas. Norman Rockwell Museum. Art Renewal Center

Digging up literary influences on this chronicler of American life requires some effort, but they are there if we search for them.

Let’s take a look.

Poetry and Faith

Widowed in the summer of 1959, Rockwell enrolled a year later in an adult poetry course taught by Molly Punderson, whom he would marry in 1961. In “Norman Rockwell: A Life,” biographer Laura Claridge reports that while the artist probably joined that class to woo the teacher, he had also clearly read some verse over his lifetime and befriended some poets.  Once, when the class became bogged down about the meaning of a Robert Frost poem, Rockwell interrupted, “I can just call up Bob myself and ask him.”

Rockwell’s favorite poem, which was read at his funeral, was Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem,” which, according to his granddaughter Abigail Rockwell, reflected his views on religious faith and people. Speaking to an angel in the poem, Abou says, “Write me as one who loves his fellow men.” That was a match for Rockwell’s own philosophy.

Words in Paint

While most of us associate Rockwell with magazines, particularly as the artist of the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, he also illustrated more than 40 books. Of these projects, two works by Mark Twain reflect perhaps the most intense interplay between books and the pictures Rockwell produced.

To celebrate the centennial of Mark Twain’s birth, in 1935 the Heritage Press of Connecticut commissioned Rockwell to produce illustrations for new editions of Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Wishing to make his illustrations as historically accurate as possible, Rockwell traveled to Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s boyhood town. There he visited the author’s house, saw the much repaired but still original picket fence of Tom Sawyer fame.

American Folklore Issue: "Tom Sawyer," 8-cent, 1972 U.S. stamp. Public Domain

In 1972, the U.S. Post Office issued a stamp with Rockwell’s painting of this scene—and spoke with numerous townspeople, noting their faces and demeanor. In “Norman Rockwell’s Rare Illustrations for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” literary writer Maria Popova favorably compares the artist’s work to the art of other great book illustrators like Gustav Dore and William Blake. She also includes a sampling of pictures readers may enjoy.

Though Rockwell didn’t always go to these extraordinary lengths in other books he illustrated, he had to be familiar with the story and the characters to recreate these in pictures. These books would have shaped his thoughts and ideas as he sought to make them beautiful.

One Master Makes Another

All literary influences pale when compared to the effect of Charles Dickens on Rockwell’s boyhood imagination and his subsequent art.

When Rockwell was 8 years old, his father began reading Dickens to the family following supper, a practice that continued for several years. In her Rockwell biography, Claridge finds this influence so powerful that she devotes an entire chapter, “A Dickensian Sensibility,” to its impact, writing that “from the first words he heard intoned, Norman found himself mesmerized by Dickens’s stories.”

The Dec. 4, 1920 cover by Norman Rockwell for The Saturday Evening Post. Public Domain

Soon the boy was recreating in his drawings the scenes and people he’d taken from Dickens. Later he would write, “I would … draw pictures of the different characters—Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep. They were pretty crude pictures, but I was very deeply impressed and moved by Dickens. … The variety, sadness, horror, happiness, treachery, the twists and turns of life, the sharp impressions of dirt, food, inns, horses, streets, and people … in Dickens shocked and delighted me.”

As Claridge points out, Rockwell was often reticent about any influences on his work, so his mentions of the writer in his conversations and in his autobiography, “My Adventures as an Illustrator,” are significant. The Dickensian characters and themes he painted for the Post’s Christmas issues during the 1920s and ‘30s pay direct homage to this teacher.

In her article “Back to School,” art curator Erin Monroe also stresses this relationship, writing like Claridge of the enormous impact of the writer and adding, “Whereas Dickens crafted using words, Rockwell’s detailed, realistic paintings told visual stories.”

As Norman Rockwell himself would later say: “The story is the first thing and the last thing.”

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