For more than 60 years, the American painter-illustrator Norman Rockwell was commissioned by the highly respected Saturday Evening Post to produce covers depicting aspects of middle American life, completing his final covers in the mid-1960s as the mood changed and his images seemed out of touch. The nearest equivalent in Britain was the magazine John Bull, which epitomised contemporary British life and forms a visual if highly patriotic view of daily life.
Norman Rockwell’s depictions of everyday life can be seen as both heart-warming in capturing the humanity of the people he depicted or overwhelmingly sentimental in their idealisation of the everyday events, although they made him the best-known and most beloved American artist of the 20th century. All the covers began life as a full-scale oil painting, sometimes painted with meticulous detail, sometimes with a loser, freer style. These were then faithfully photographed and adapted to the magazine format. Early covers have white borders that served to frame the image, but later ones spill over the edge, creating a more relaxed presentation.
What is evident is Rockwell’s sheer technical skill at rendering the image and his eye for detail. Like all illustration, what you see is what you get. Here, it is focused to tell a specific story, to depict a scene that is unambiguous in its message. In one image, a clown wipes the tears from the eye of a boy, offering comfort at his evident disappointment. It is touching in its trust and intimacy, if more chocolate box than documentary. Equally engaging is an image of two charwomen, theatre cleaners, sitting in the empty seats scrutinising the theatre programme. Their curiosity suggests that while they clean, polish and dust the building, the programme is the closest they will get to the actual performance. It is subtle study of social and economic divide.
A glimpse of the trails of married life is offered in Breakfast Table Political Argument, of a couple and their child eating a meal, disagreeing over some aspect of news. In a domestic scene of some formality, the well-dressed
pair are evidently arguing over their own interpretation of the paper they hold. However, it is the mood ofcloseness that allows some fierce debate to take place.
While Rockwell lived and worked through one of the most eventful periods in the nation’s history, a search through the 323 Saturday Evening Post covers created between 1916 and 1963, illustrations for advertisements, magazines and books as well as original paintings, reveal no pictures of segregated blacks or the dire poverty of the 1930s. This was quite simply because this was not what the Post wanted. It preferred to present an untroubled image. There is a wry, gentle humour to Rockwell’s illustrations that suggest that he was not aiming for verisimilitude but a heightened and often slightly surreal view of the everyday scenes he so carefully constructed. It is best to enjoy the work for what it is rather than criticise it for what it isn’t.
