His iconic works defined the nation's identity for a generation with a folkloric brand of imagery that was tender but never schmaltzy, playful but always reverent. The paintings may look dated today, but the themes they explore and sentiments they express are timeless.

Many of those paintings started as a photograph, each of which reveals the same masterful attention to detail as Rockwell's iconic artwork. He took thousands of reference pictures over the years, meticulously composing and framing his scenes long before popping open a tube of paint.

The painter began using photography in the 1930s. He was the kind of artist who had to constantly see what he was sketching, but his models often could not hold their poses as long as he required. A camera allowed him to freeze their exaggerated movements and expressive faces for reference later. It gave his work a sense of vitality, his characters straddling the line between reality and fiction.

Rockwell approached each photograph like a director would a film. He bought costumes and props and also personally chose people in various New England towns—mainly Arlington, Vermont and Stockbridge, Massachusetts—to be his models. He favored "human-looking humans" like Dan Walsh, the pot-bellied postman who played Santa in Extra Good Boys and Girls, and Scott Ingram, the wide-eyed boy who finds a Santa suit in his father's dresser in The Discovery.

The painter went to great lengths to find just the right model, prop or location. For Santa's Helper, Rockwell traveled more than 800 miles to Chicago to shoot at Marshall Field, the renowned upscale department store. Though the company supplied Rockwell with numerous toys and even a clerk to photograph, he bought his own toys and spent weeks looking for a model who more closely fit his vision of the scene. He chose Sophie Aumand, a waitress from Springfield, Massachusetts, to represent exhausted holiday clerks everywhere. The painting appeared on the cover of the Post in December 1947. "Rockwell was not an impulsive artist—every detail was fastidiously planned and re-planned," Schick says.

Rockwell shot his photos on location or in a studio, against a neutral screen. He acted the scenes out so the models knew what he wanted, and coached them from the sidelines, occasionally stepping in to refine a pose. He never actually dealt with lighting or clicked the shutter, leaving that to a hired hand.

After the shoot, Rockwell made a charcoal sketch from the photograph, refining the composition. These drawings rarely reflected a single photo; he often mixed and matched bits and pieces from as many as 100 photos before painting. He also liked to play with lines and curves—pinching noses and exaggerating bellies—to get that extra bit of mischief and magic.

Over time, Rockwell's work came to reflect, and then define, an idealized vision of American life, particularly during the holidays. He illustrated iconic mythologies—Santa preparing his reindeer for flight, seemingly perfect families decorating their Christmas tree. And he also gave us more realistic scenes—a tired clerk in the toy department on Christmas Eve, and a flustered boy discovering Santa isn't real. His oeuvre included 29 Christmas-themed covers for the Saturday Evening Post and many holiday cards and ads.

His photos, though less famous, are no less remarkable. Like Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson, Rockwell told stories by orchestrating every detail in the frame. They are works of art in their own right, and worthy of the same admiration.

The speed trap, which came about as automobiles became more widely owned, provided inspiration for this Saturday Evening Post cover. Rockwell himself had been caught in a speed trap several months before this cover appeared--it was not Elmville, however, which is a fictional town.

American Mirror tells the story of a neurasthenic illustrator who was almost willfully uninteresting.

What drama there is comes not from the incidents of Rockwell’s life but from how, everything in his art actually represents its opposite. Rockwell created the imagery of the Boy Scouts—his most lucrative and long-lasting gig was for the annual Boy Scout calendar—but he was himself not particularly outdoorsy, a neat freak who couldn’t bear to get dirty. He created memorable images of piety (Saying Grace, 1951), but his clan was uninterested in religion; captured scenes of scampi rebellion (The Shiner, 1954) but was rule-bound and order-obsessed; and, most damningly,  painted odes to family togetherness (The Homecoming, 1948) but was so affectionless that his own family despaired of ever knowing him.

His first bride, Irene O’Connor, divorced him in 1930 on grounds of “mental cruelty;” his second wife, Mary Barstow, was driven to alcoholism and finally the mental hospital by his remove. He and his wife once sailed to England to abort a pregnancy. Only his third wife, Molly Punderson, whom he met when he was 65 and she 64, seems to have been a fit, and they slept in separate beds. At last, he had found his feminine ideal, an elderly schoolteacher who was unlikely to make sexual demands on him.

American Mirror’s most controversial point will likely be the conclusion that part of the sexless character of Rockwell’s oeuvre can be traced to his own repression, specifically the fact that he was attracted to men but unable to express it. While living in New Rochelle, Rockwell forged an extremely intimate relationship with the Leyendecker brothers, famous illustrators who created the proto-metrosexual “Arrow Collar Man,” and were gay.

Seeking therapy in the late ’50s, Rockwell apparently confessed to having “overly intense relationships” with men, though he was so reserved, even in his private correspondence, that it is hard to know what he meant by this.  Piecing together the details of a two-week-long long fishing trip he took to Canada in 1934 with his handsome model and studio assistant, Fred Hildebrandt, Solomon comes to a suggestive dead end:

The trip raises a complicated question: Was Rockwell homosexual? It depends on what you mean by the word. He demonstrated an intense need for emotional and physical closeness with men. From the viewpoint of twenty-first-century gender studies, a man who yearns for the company of men is considered homosexual, whether or not he has sex with other men.

In Rockwell’s case, there is nothing to suggest that he had sex with men. The distinction between secret desires and frank sexual acts, though perhaps not crucial to theorists today, was certainly crucial to Rockwell.

In the final decade of his life, Rockwell created a trust to ensure his artistic legacy would thrive long after his passing. His work became the centerpiece of what is now called the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. In 1977, one year before his death, Rockwell was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford. In his speech Ford said, "Artist, illustrator and author, Norman Rockwell has portrayed the American scene with un-rivaled freshness and clarity. Insight, optimism and good humor are the hall-marks of his artistic style. His vivid and affectionate portraits of our country and ourselves have become a beloved part of the American tradition."

When Molly and him were vacationing in the Caribbean about 1975, Norman went out on a bicycle by himself and didn’t return when he’d said he would. Molly went looking for him and found him alongside of the road. He’d lost his balance, fallen off the bike and couldn’t get up. But he continued to ride his bicycle almost 5 miles a day. Then he had another fall, and had to give up bicycling.

Toward the end, at 84, in and out of dementia, unable to work, he still was wheeled into the studio every day to listen to classical music, wash his brushes, arrange his stuff, putter around, do everything but paint.