Rockwell was the great master of the obvious. What makes a Rockwell a Rockwell—more even than in the use of "props"—is the way in which he presents faces and hands. "No Swimming" may be impressionistic, but the face and visible hand of the boy in the foreground have been painted with an intensity and an attention to detail that is not found elsewhere on the canvas, except in the face of the dog.

You can take almost any Rockwell cover from any period, and you will find that more care has been spent on the faces and hands than on anything else. These features give the composition its focal centers. In fact, one reason why many of the costume paintings fail is that, in those instances, Rockwell has sacrificed the emphasis on faces and hands to his interest in rendering fabrics and period folderols.

Occasionally Rockwell indulged in caricature, but more usually, when dealing with the face, he gave us a kind of heightened naturalism that verged on caricature without quite crossing the line. He was particularly good at dealing with such things as family relationships as they are expressed in shared features. He had the knack of concentrating on those little physical similarities that we are all aware of but cannot always define precisely. If we look again at the father and son in "Breaking Home Ties," we can see exactly what Rockwell was capable of when faced with such similarities. The hands, too, in that painting are worth careful study. They are as expressive of family bonds as anything that Rockwell has found in the two faces.

Always, then, it is the little human touches that make Rockwell's paintings memorable. Without them, his brilliance as a storyteller could never have had quite the same ring of authenticity.

Norman did not have to join the military to help the United States fight the war. He was very proud. Although the Four Freedoms series was a great success, 1943 also brought Rockwell an enormous loss. Just a few days after Norman sent off the Four Freedoms to The Saturday Evening Post, a fire destroyed his Arlington studio as well as numerous paintings and his collection of historical costumes and props.

Then Norman built a new studio and got back to work. Norman’s paintings changed after the fire. He had new brushes, easels, and paints, but he lost all the old-fashioned costumes and props he had collected. After the fire his work focused more on the present and no longer painted scenes with early presidents, pirates, or pioneers. 

In 1953, the Rockwell family moved from Arlington, Vermont, to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Six years later, Mary Barstow Rockwell died unexpectedly. In collaboration with his son Thomas, Rockwell published his autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, in 1960. The Saturday Evening Post carried excerpts from the best-selling book in eight consecutive issues, with Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait on the cover of the first.

In 1961, Rockwell married Molly Punderson, a retired teacher. Two years later, he ended his 47-year association with The Saturday Evening Post and began to work for Look magazine. During his 10-year association with Look, Rockwell painted pictures illustrating some of his deepest concerns and interests, including civil rights, America’s war on poverty, and the exploration of space.

In 1973, Rockwell established a trust to preserve his artistic legacy by placing his works in the custodianship of the Old Corner House Stockbridge Historical Society, later to become Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge. The trust now forms the core of the Museum’s permanent collections. In 1976, in failing health, Rockwell became concerned about the future of his studio. He arranged to have his studio and its contents added to the trust. In 1977, Rockwell received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died peacefully at his home in Stockbridge on November 8, 1978, at the age of 84.

Rockwell occupied some 20 studios during his life, but it was the last one that he called his “best studio yet.”

The building was originally located in the backyard of his home on South Street in Stockbridge, Mass. In 1976, toward the end of his life, Rockwell left the studio and its contents to Norman Rockwell Museum. The building was cut in two and moved to the Museum’s grounds in 1986. Link to 360 degree video tour of the studio

The Museum has long presented the studio as it was when Rockwell passed away. Now, we have turned back the clock to an earlier, active period in his career: October 1960, when he was hard at work on his painting, Golden Rule, which would later appear on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Enjoy this special glimpse into Rockwell’s surroundings, working process, and sources of artistic inspiration…just as they were in 1960!

THE FOUR FREEDOMS

In his January 1941 address to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt articulated his vision for a postwar world founded on four basic human freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

In the spring of 1942, Norman Rockwell was working on a piece commissioned by the Ordnance Department of the U.S. Army, a painting of a machine gunner in need of ammunition. Posters of the gunner, titled Let’s Give Him Enough and On Time, were distributed to ordnance plants throughout the country to encourage production. But Rockwell wanted to do more for the war effort and decided he would illustrate Roosevelt’s four freedoms. While mulling it over, Rockwell, by chance, attended a town meeting where one man rose among his neighbors and voiced an unpopular view. That night Rockwell awoke with the realization that he could paint the freedoms best from the perspective of his own hometown experiences using every day, simple scenes such as his own town meeting. Rockwell made some rough sketches and accompanied by fellow Post cover artist Mead Schaeffer, went to Washington to propose his poster idea. The timing was wrong. The Ordnance Department didn’t have the resources for another commission. On his way back to Vermont, Rockwell stopped at Curtis Publishing Company, publisher of The Saturday Evening Post, and showed his sketches to editor Ben Hibbs. Hibbs immediately made plans to use the illustrations in the Post. Rockwell was given permission to interrupt his work for the magazine—typically one cover per month—for three months. But Rockwell “got a bad case of stage fright,” and it was two and a half months before he even began the project. “It was a job that should have been tackled by Michelangelo,” he said in a New Yorker interview three years later.

The paintings were a phenomenal success. After their publication, the Post received 25,000 requests for reprints. In May 1943, representatives from the Post and the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced a joint campaign to sell war bonds and stamps. They would send the Four Freedoms paintings along with 1,000 original cartoons and paintings by other illustrators and original manuscripts from The Saturday Evening Post on a national tour.

Traveling to sixteen cities, the exhibition was visited by more than a million people who purchased 133 million dollars in war bonds and stamps. Bonds were sold in denominations of $25, $100, and $1,000, and each person who purchased one received a set of prints of the four paintings. In addition, the Office of War Information printed four million sets of posters of the paintings. Each was printed with the words “Buy War Bonds.” They were distributed in United States schools and institutions, and overseas.