Norman Rockwell was born in New York on February 3, 1894. He began his career early, receiving his first assignments as an illustrator when he was still a teen. At the age of 22, Rockwell was requested to paint the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. This assignment began a 47 year relationship in which he would design covers for the magazine. As decades passed, Rockwell traced changes in society. His Post covers often mirrored the changing culture of the Unites States, depicting everything from the radio and television, to flights to the moon. He also focused on children and the common man, creating pictures of everyday life that when looked back upon today, fill a viewer with a sense of knowledge regarding the past years. By 1936, about 20 years after he began his work for the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell had was asked to illustrate The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and in 1940, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both by Mark Twain. The task came rather easily, for Rockwell had always painted things as they were. He knew that children had a knack for getting into trouble. Works such as �No Swimming� (1921) portrayed this tendency in children, and he continued the style through the illustrations of these two books. World War II brought new conflicts to the United States. After FDR�s famous �Four Freedoms� speech in 1943, Rockwell painted a four-part series reflecting these particular freedoms. The paintings became and still are very famous. Several years later Rockwell�s studio would burn to the ground and he relocated from New Rochelle to Stockbridge Massachusetts. In 1963, after 47 years of dedication and hard work, Rockwell published his last Post cover. Over the next several years he would publish various illustrations for Look magazine. In 1977, only a year before his death, President Gerald Ford awarded Rockwell the Presidential Medal of Freedom for Rockwell�s �vivid and affectionate portraits of our country�. Norman Rockwell died peacefully in his own home on November 8, 1978. |
