Rockwell wanted to be an artist from early childhood. When he was fourteen he left high school to enroll in the New York School of Art, and in 1910 he went on to study art at the National Academy of Design. From there he transferred to the Art Students League, where he studied under illustrator Thomas Fogarty and drawing instructor George Bridgman, who taught him the technical skills he would use throughout his career in commercial painting.
Rockwell had already gained success as an artist while in his teens. He painted his first commission of four Christmas cards before he turned sixteen. He was hired as a staff artist for Boys’ Life, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America, and received fifty dollars a month for each completed cover and set of story illustrations. At age nineteen he became the art director for Boys’ Life, and started freelancing for other youth publications, such as St. Nicholas Magazine. In 1915, his family moved to New Rochelle, New York, where he set up a studio with cartoonist Victor Clyde Forsythe and did commissions for Life Magazine and The Literary Digest.
Rockwell married his first wife, Irene O’Connor, in 1916. She was the model for his painting “Mother Tucking Children into Bed,” which was published on the cover of The Literary Digest on January 19, 1921. They divorced in 1930 and he married school teacher Mary Barstow, with whom he had three children – Jarvis Waring (b. 1932), Thomas Rhodes (b. 1933), and Peter Barstow (1936-2020). Mary passed away in 1961 and he married retired teacher Molly Punderson.
Rockwell produced more than four thousand works over his lifetime, including illustrations for movie posters, booklets, catalogs, postage stamps, playing cards, sheet music, and murals. He worked on advertisements for Coca-Cola, General Motors, Scott Tissue, and Jell-O. He painted the covers for more than forty books, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. From 1916 to 1963 he produced three hundred and twenty-three magazine covers for The Saturday Evening Post. Between 1925 and 1976, he created fifty-one annual illustrations for the Boy Scouts of America calendar and dozens of covers for Boys’ Life.
Rockwell painted portraits of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), and Richard Nixon (1913-1994), as well as other world leaders. The subjects of his portraits included actor Judy Garland (1922-1969) as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Sanders (1890-1980). Completed in 1973, the painting of Sanders was one of his final portraits.
In 1977 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. He died peacefully at his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts on November 3, 1978, at the age of eighty-four. The world’s largest collection of his work is housed in the Norman Rockwell Museum, which was founded in Stockbridge in 1969 and remains open to this day.
(Written by Michael Freborg)