“Walking To Church”

ROCKWELL HIMSELF HAS CRITICIZED this painting, saying that it was a mistake to treat the church bound family as caricatures since it weakens the impact of an otherwise naturalistic painting. Certainly, most of the interest resides in the background, which is superbly rendered in an idiom reminiscent of the work of the Dutch realists of the seventeenth century.

Rockwell gives us here a scrupulously honest portrait of a down-at-heel neighborhood in one of our older Northern cities. There is garbage on the streets, and you can almost smell yesterday's pork chops in the dining room of the Silver Slipper Grill.

The adventures of Steve Canyon and Little Orphan Annie are waiting to be read on front-door steps. Windows are open to admit the mild, spring air, while birds are scattered by the bell that clangs in the nearby church steeple. The weathered facades of the buildings -- each several generations old -- are lovingly rendered by the artist, who does not exclude from his painting, however, the television antennae that have sprouted on the roofs at a much more recent date.

This is Rockwell's tribute to the kind of neighborhood that one of his great contemporaries, Edward Hopper, loved to paint. Rockwell's approach is far more traditional than Hopper's -- he paints in a style that was current long before these buildings were erected -- but the picture is nonetheless touching for that.