“Breaking Home Ties”

ONE OF NORMAN ROCKWELL'S finest paintings, an instance of his special gifts and decades of experience meeting in an ideal subject. Father and son sit on the running board of an ancient, battered truck beside the tracks of a rural railroad station. The son, dressed in his best suit, with a crisp, white shirt and a necktie that seems a little too gaudy, waits eagerly for the train that will carry him to college.

The father, dressed in blue coveralls—he has the face and hands of a man who has spent his life in the fields, exposed to the elements— stares off into space, presumably contemplating the passage of time and the changes that his son's departure will bring to his life.

The family's collie rests its chin on the boy's knee. The boy holds lunch carefully wrapped by his mother, who—perhaps because of the sadness of the occasion—has not come to see him off. The father holds two hats. His own is a practical, wide brimmed number designed to shield him from sun and rain. His son's is a snappy new Stetson decorated with a colored band.This is a thoughtful and controlled treatment of a subject that could easily have seemed maudlin.

 Both figures command our respect, and every detail is just right, down to the markers in the boy's textbooks, which tell us that, eager to continue his education, he has already begun his schoolwork. A classic twentieth-century illustration.