“Four Seasons Calendar – Grandpa and Me”

SUMMER 1948

ROCKWELL WAS BORN IN NEW YORK CITY, on the Upper West Side, but is on record as saying that he always preferred the countryside to anything that Manhattan had to offer. As a boy he always looked forward to summer because it meant that he would, for a while, be able to escape the brick-and-asphalt environment that imprisoned him for the balance of the year.

Summer was a time when the entire Rockwell family left the city for a long, rustic vacation. With this in mind we can assume that Rockwell had little difficulty in transporting himself back to those idyllic days when he painted this picture.

The picture captures, without fuss, long, languid afternoons spent on grassy slopes breathing in the scents of nature and dozing beneath a sky alive with butterflies.