“Stolen Clothes”

AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN NORMAN ROCKWELL became the art editor of Boy's Life. He soon moved on to more exalted things, but he never forgot this beginning, and in that respect, he may be compared with another stalwart of The Saturday Evening Post, P. G. Wodehouse, who started his career writing stories for British schoolboy magazines. The two can, in fact, be compared in many ways: Both sustained extraordinarily long careers by remaining faithful to the values that had first made them popular.

Rockwell has always felt particularly comfortable portraying the everyday adventures of pre-adolescent boys. He understands their simple pleasures and the predictable crises of their lives. Many of his early Post covers were rooted in the kind of material he had produced for Boy's Life. In this example a dog has stolen the pants of the youthful bather. Rockwell simply took the kind of situation he had been called on to illustrate dozens of times and made a lively cover from it.

This may seem an easy enough thing to have done, but we should not lose sight of the fact that it was rather bold of him to use this Boy's Life kind of material on the cover of something as prestigious as the Post. From our perspective this cover may seem rather old-fashioned. At the time it was painted it represented a breath of fresh air in the context in which it appeared.