‘A pipe seemed to be a permanent fixture on Norman Rockwell’s face.’

You rarely see a photo of him without it. His Dunhill was “an important element in his self-branded image,” says the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. 

His art director’s son commented that “his pigeon-toed feet, the smoke-filled studio and worrying that the lanky old man would dump his pipe ashes in the copper bucket near his easel that held his oil paint-covered rags, and we’d all go up in flames”.

Ashes from his pipe caused the fire that destroyed his Arlington studio in 1943.

The pipe likely contributed to his emphysema demise.