CBS, The Washington Post and The New Yorker have all used "Rockwell" or "Rockwellian" as shorthand for the values that many of the GOP candidates claim to represent.

Joshua Brown, writing for Forbes, called the GOP primary "a process by which the candidate who demonstrates the most willingness to bring back Norman Rockwell's America wins."

And in 2010, when Newt Gingrich spoke to Esquire, he described his family as the kind of people that "Norman Rockwell captures in his pictures."

But was Rockwell a Republican?

His most iconic series of paintings, "The Four Freedoms," was based on Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 address to Congress, and much of his work - particularly that created during the civil rights movement and Vietnam War - suggests a social liberalism.

But when approached by reporters about his political affiliation, Rockwell always claimed to be an independent voter. And his record seems to back it up.

In 1948, he cast his ballot for Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas. In later years, he voted for Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he painted for The Saturday Evening Post.

November 8, 1960, a 66-year-old widower and self-described “moderate Republican” went to his polling place in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to vote for his state’s junior senator for president. Never the most forthcoming of men, Norman Rockwell hadn’t told his family he was backing John F. Kennedy. He’d painted portraits of both candidates for the Saturday Evening Post, and he just didn’t like Richard Nixon’s face.

The tumultuous ’60s would convert Rockwell into an overt social liberal — and the era’s unlikeliest practitioner of polemical art. Indeed, one of the minor marvels of the ’60s was that the period made Rockwell happier than he’d ever been. The hippies he came to dote on had a word for it: liberation.

During his career, Rockwell had the opportunity to meet and paint many presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, including John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

His portrait of Nixon still hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and shows a much more relaxed man than many Americans are accustomed to.

Rockwell called Nixon "the hardest man I ever had to paint" because he "fell into the troublesome category of almost good-looking."

In July 2011, President Obama hung Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," on loan from the Norman Rockwell Museum, in a West Wing hallway near the Oval Office.

The painting depicts 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, an African American, being escorted into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans as those opposed to integration yell racial slurs at her.

At the White House unveiling of the painting, President Obama told Bridges, "I think it's fair to say that if it wasn't for you guys, I wouldn't be here today."

In 1964, the same year "The Problem We All Live With" ran in Look magazine, Rockwell used an illustration to explain his political position, which read:

"I positively know who I'm voting for, but if anyone can guess, I've failed as an old political art pro."

In 1968 despite his aversion to Nixon as president as a subject for portraiture, Rockwell had voted for him this time around. Whatever prompted his choice — loss of heart, alienation from the Democratic Party’s 1968 shambles, or credulous hope that Nixon might actually end the war in Vietnam — it was a wan coda to the most dramatic and exhilarated (indeed, the only) self-reinvention of his long career.