Early examples of Rockwell's mature technique (which might be described as "fictional" documentary, or synthetic documentary) are to be found in the Willie Gillis covers, a series that Rockwell painted between October 1941 and October 1946. Rockwell was concerned in those covers with portraying the plight of "an ordinary inoffensive little guy thrown into the chaos of war."

At the time he was looking for a suitable model for his Gillis, Rockwell was attending a square dance in Vermont; there he spotted a young man named Robert Buck who he thought would be exactly right. Even better, from a practical point of view, Buck was supposedly unfit for military duty; he would thus be available to pose for as many covers as Rockwell might care to paint around that particular character.

After Rockwell had painted five Gillis covers, however, Buck succeeded in passing his physical and was inducted into the service, leaving Rockwell with the predicament of having invented a popular character—one who was making his quiet contribution to morale on the home front—but no model to paint him from. Rockwell hit on the solution of devising scenes in which the photographic likeness of Buck/Gillis could be used to stand in for the flesh and blood character.

After the war, when Buck came back home, Rockwell used him as a live model once more, winding the series up with a portrayal of Willie's return to civilian life.

The impression of this sequence of covers was that of a documentary portrait of one young man 's progress from the period immediately before Pearl Harbor to the period after V-J Day. In fact, of course, Willie Gillis was entirely a figment of Norman Rockwell's imagination—a symbolic protagonist designed to serve a specific purpose at a specific time. If there is anything atypical of Rockwell 's career in this, it is only the notion of using a single character over an extended period of time—a device that enabled Willie to come to seem like someone that everyone had known. The way in which a kind of synthetic "reality" was created—through the agency of the illustrator's imagination—from models, photographs, and sketches was, however, entirely characteristic of the kind of approach Rockwell would utilize throughout the latter part of his career.

Generally, then, each of Rockwell's protagonists is called upon just once, to grace a single cover. We encounter each one like a figure chanced upon in a snapshot that has been selected almost at random from some family album. Yet, in the later work, all the images seem somehow connected. They belong to the same world.

The young couple portrayed in "Marriage License" might well move into one of the houses we see in the background of "Commuters. " It is easy to imagine that the counterman we are shown in "After the Prom' has his hair cut on the premises presented in "Shuffleton's Barber Shop. " As we study Rockwell's covers—especially since the late thirties—we begin to feel that every image interlocks with a half dozen others. In a sense they are all part of one massive work. Each takes on a greater significance because of those that have preceded it and those that will follow it. As has been remarked, Rockwell enriched his work by making his vision more explicit as time went by, but time itself enriched it by bringing the sum of his previous achievements to bear on each new painting

A Rockwell painting is immediately recognizable as a Rockwell painting. Clearly, he does have a style that is unlike any other. It is not easy to define, however, because it does not depend upon any broad mannerisms. It is, rather, made up of small but significant deviations from the photographic and academic norms.

The best of his early works is, in general, more "painterly" than most of his later canvases, though these later canvases tended to make more successful covers. Being "painterly," is that they are conceived and executed more as conventional easel paintings, whereas the later works often have the look of tinted drawings (even though they are executed in oil paint on canvas). This difference should not be taken as a hard and fast rule, but it does represent a significant tendency, as a few examples will show.

If we turn to the 1921 cover "No Swimming," we find that it has been painted in an almost impressionistic way.

There is no question here of an outline having been drawn then filled in with color. On the contrary, the image is built up from areas of boldly applied pigment—a well-loaded brush is evident—overlapping and overlaying each other to build up planes that create the illusion of solidity and depth. (Note in particular the way in which the anatomy of the boy in the foreground has been evoked.) Many of the edges of forms have been deliberately blurred in this picture, partly to help produce a sense of speed, but largely as a natural consequence of this approach to image-making. Even Rockwell's highly stylized signature is loosely painted. Turning to the 1930 cover "Gary Cooper, " we find a composition that is less impressionistic but equally painterly. Again, it is built up from carefully placed and orchestrated patches of pigment that add up to the kind of plastic presentation of an image that would win the approval of the most academic of easel painters.

The first color cover in 1926. George Horace Lorimer chose Rockwell for the honor. Lorimer had an issue with the model, James K. Van Brunt, who had a face only a mother and Norman Rockwell could love.  “I think you’re using that man too much,” the famous editor complained. Indeed, if you look at old Post covers, that face, usually with a big bushy mustache, kept cropping up. Rockwell broke the news to Van Brunt that he couldn’t use him again unless he shaved off that distinctive brush. The model wouldn’t, and, dejected, left. He returned to Rockwell’s studio two weeks later and said he’d do it for ten dollars. “I guess the notoriety he’d gained from posing for me had overcome his pride and his mustache.” Rockwell paid him. (For more covers with this model, enter Van Brunt in our search engine for our feature, “I Know That Face!”)

Later examples of Rockwell's cover art often show a very different approach. The 1946 cover painting "New York Central Diner" is a clear instance of the dominance of drawing over painting. The dining car itself has been evoked with little more than a few lines, many of them established with the help of a ruler, and everywhere—even in the figures—the outline is dominant. Within these outlines the minimum of modeling is used to produce an illusion of depth and solidity. Again, the signature is symbolic of the overall approach: Rockwell has left in the guidelines that ordinarily he would have painted out. If we look at a sixties cover like 'The Window Washer," we see how clearly the finished painting is prefigured in the preliminary drawing. In many such instances, in fact, the work that appeared on the cover of the Post was little more than a drawing transferred onto canvas and heightened with color.

Often, in his later work, Rockwell uses a rather artificial kind of texture to give the illusion of painterliness to what is, in fact, a tinted drawing. In particular, he is fond of a very deliberate kind of impasto (physical buildup of pigment), often applying it in what seems at first glance like a wholly inappropriate way, as for example in his treatment of the mirror in "Triple Self Portrait”.

 An extreme example of the application of this technique occurs in the 1946 cover "Commuters”. This is a composition governed almost entirely by carefully drawn outlines, but practically the entire area of the canvas has been further enlivened through the use of thickly textured underpainting—roofs, platforms, hillside are all given variations of texture—and clearly this was no accident. Rockwell used this device because he knew that it reproduced well.

As the years passed, Rockwell learned to use any trick of the trade that would lend itself to reproduction and hence contribute to the impact of the cover itself. Correspondingly, he became less and less concerned with what was correct from a strictly academic point of view. He realized, in short, that he was not going to be judged as a conventional easel painter. Again and again he would tell people, "I am not an artist. I am an illustrator.' Rockwell's facility was such that he was equally at home whether he was emphasizing the painterly aspects of his skills or demonstrating his virtuosity as a draftsman. It seems to me, in fact, that his finest work generally came about when he achieved some kind of balance between two approaches, as happened from time to time throughout his career, especially in the forties and fifties. To see this, we might look at four of his most successful canvases: "Shuffleton 's Barber Shop," "Solitaire," "Breaking Home Ties," and "The Marriage License”. In "Shuffleton's Barber Shop" everything is clearly defined in terms of outlines—we sense the drawing beneath the paint surface—yet there are wonderful painterly touches, such as the atmospheric suggestion of the reflections in the window at the rear of the shop. It is almost as if Rockwell has tried to capture the spirit of the chamber music that is being played in the back room, as if he were searching for an exact blend of line and timbre, of melody and harmony. In the case of "Solitaire," too, we sense that a careful pencil study has been transferred to the canvas. But here Rockwell seems to have been carried away—delightfully so—by the textures and colors of the seedy hotel room. The carpet and the wallpaper have been conjured up with a splendid fluidity of brushwork. The gaudy necktie draped in the foreground is like a miniature abstract painting in itself.

"Breaking Home Ties" is perhaps the most painterly of all Rockwell 's mature covers— it may just be the finest painting he ever did—but even here the draftsmanship is far more in evidence than in, for example, an early masterpiece like "No Swimming." "The Marriage License," painted just a few months after "Breaking Home Ties," does not display quite the same involvement with paint for its own sake, but still, it is much more than just another tinted drawing.

One suspects that Rockwell probably took this composition further than he had anticipated when he first painted it. The idea is rather conventional, but evidently it triggered something in Rockwell's imagination, and he brought more passion than usual to the painting, passion that is evident in the sheer richness of the pigment. Rockwell was a master of many techniques, then, and he used whatever means was necessary to get across his point.

Certain things, however, are constant in his work from the very beginning. There was, for example, something immediately recognizable about the way he assembled the "props" for his paintings. He was never afraid of making the most obvious choices, nor was he afraid of organizing them in the most obvious way. Turning to "Breaking Home Ties" once more, it is full of deliberate contrasts that are anything but subtle. Notice the way the father's worn shoes have been pointedly contrasted with the son's shiny new ones. The word to describe this is—inescapably—"obvious. " There is something obvious, too, about the little still life to the left of the picture, made up of the signalman's flag and lamp set down so conveniently on the black trunk. Almost every decision that has been made in this wonderful composition is, essentially, obvious.