“Traffic Conditions”

IN THIS EXAMPLE FROM THE LATE Forties, Rockwell took the format that was demanded by Post covers during that period and packed it with colorful characters. There are no fewer than twenty figures in this painting—relatively unusual in his cover art—not counting the creature that is the center of all attention.

Each figure—the artist and his model, the cyclist, the music teacher, her approaching student and his haughty mother, down to the toddler in his sagging diapers—is beautifully characterized. The liveliness of the work is ironic, given its subject.

A truck is blocking a narrow alleyway, its progress made impossible by a truculent bulldog. The incident gives Rockwell the opportunity to evoke lovingly a slightly run-down neighborhood and the people who inhabit it.