Helen Palmquist of Lincolnshire, Illinois, went right for a fun one: “My favorite is the little boy looking in Grandpa’s overcoat, not realizing a puppy is in the other pocket.” Rockwell had his beloved Uncle Gil in mind when he created this 1936 cover. Uncle Gil was something of a scientist and inventor, Rockwell wrote in My Life as an Illustrator. “But he did have one eccentricity, he got his holidays mixed up. On Christmas day, with snow on the ground and a cold wind in the trees, Uncle Gil would arrive loaded with firecrackers to celebrate the Fourth of July. On Easter he would bring us Christmas gifts.

“He always had a kind of Christmas spirit about him—jovial, warmhearted, shouting, ‘Warm, Norman, warm!’ as I approached a hidden present and ‘Hurrah!’ when I found it. … I don’t think I have ever enjoyed any gifts as much as I used to Uncle Gil’s.”

Saying Grace is the favorite of Nicole Beer from our staff in Indianapolis, Indiana. “It reminds me of my grandmother even down to the way Rockwell painted the lady’s hands. I remember being a kid and always praying in public with her before we ate. Everyone would always stare at us and it would make me embarrassed. I hated it as a kid but as an adult, I am so thankful for her and the example she set. I can only hope I am as bold with my faith as she was.”

Saying Grace has an interesting history. Click here to read about which of Rockwell’s sons appears in this illustration and how fellow Post artist George Hughes’ discouragement drove Rockwell to complete this painting.

“There is only one that stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of sheer beauty and deep meaning—The Marriage License,” writes Barbie Thompson of Calgary, Alberta.

“Manning this department, no doubt years before these two lovebirds were even born,” writes Barbie of the elderly clerk, “[he] has seen it all and therefore knows this path all too well—the Good and the Bad, the Happy and Not-So-Happy Endings. The only personal warmth for him now comes from his kitty, those well-smoked cigarettes, and the well-chewed loose tobacco targeted to the spittoon, and the slow-burning, unseen embers from that ancient cast-iron stove.”

Barbie may be more right in that last sentence than she knows. Anne Braman, daughter-in-law of the gentleman who posed as the clerk, wrote in a 1976 Post article that her mother-in law had died the year The Marriage License was painted.

“Mr. Rockwell—knowing my father-in-law Jason C. Braman—realized how upset he was, and he thought if he could get him to model it would give him something new to think about.”

Rockwell was right about the new activity having a therapeutic effect on the widower, wrote Anne, “As soon as the The Marriage License appeared on the cover of the Post, people recognized him immediately. When his friends commented to him about the cover, he would say, ‘Would you like for me to autograph your copy?’ And he would. When I told Mr. Rockwell about this, he was quite amused.”

[Anne Braman modeled for Rockwell as the schoolteacher in the 1956 cover Happy Birthday Mrs. Jones. Read more about her here.]

“I love all baseball covers, but I find this one particularly interesting,” writes Cris Piquinela one of our Post staffers.

“First off, I don’t think most people looking at this cover would think it is a Rockwell. There are no children or people visible, no characteristic facial expressions. However, what I like about this cover is that it forces me to ‘create’ or imagine the scene in my head. I can’t see the person looking through the hole, but I imagine a freckled, redheaded, barefoot kid. At the same time, I can sense the excitement of the pitch, a great hit by the player at bat, and the entire crowd going crazy. This cover does not tell me what I am looking at … it forces me to imagine it. Plus, I love only having a small piece of the image shown to me.”

It is also interesting to note the way Rockwell “carved” his signature in the painting.

Remember to tell us your favorite Post cover for our “Reader Favorites” series. The first “Reader’s Favorite Rockwells” begins next week! Email letters@satevepost.org and include your name, along with the title and date or just a good description of your favorite piece.

Armor

Rockwell visited the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, and came away with an idea for this 1962 Post cover. He recreates the setting with remarkable accuracy, except for two key elements: the guard eating his lunch and the hungry horse eyeballing him were strictly out of Rockwell famous imagination. Proof indeed that an artist’s mind can be a strange place, but it does show Rockwell thinking outside the box (or perhaps, outside the ol’ swimming hole). Additionally, the sumptuous display was an ideal setting for his passion for reproducing intricate details.

The Bridge Game

“I have two radio bridge programs,” wrote a reader from Oregon in 1948, and “ever since the appearance of your May 15th issue, I’ve been swamped with mail asking what I think the redhead with the gardenia should do.” (note: in Letters to Editor July 3, 1948, page 8)

If you think Rockwell was a stickler for details, you should get a bridge player started! Many wrote in to say what the redhead should do, citing percentages and probabilities.

The idea for the painting had been fermenting in the artist’s brain for three years, with Post Art Editor Ken Stuart clipping and sending him bridge cartoons to prod him. Rockwell finally did deal the cards, with the assistance of a bridge expert, and produced this delightful painting done from a most difficult perspective.

Circus Artist

Borrowing the “wild-woman” banner for this carnival scene may not seem a big deal, but having two merry-go-round horses weighing in at 365 pounds each shipped to his Vermont studio was, well, for Rockwell, not that unusual, either. “If a convoy rolled into Arlington, Vermont,” claimed Post editors in this 1947 issue, “bearing a stuffed whale, a cast-iron deer and a grandfather clock,” townsfolk would simply point and say, “Rockwell’s house is up that way.” The artist didn’t let much stop him when it came to props, and indeed, the rest of the world was happy to fall in line. “We came home from church one Sunday and he was closing our front door,” former Rockwell model, Mary Whalen Leonard, recently told us. “He said, ‘Oh, I was hoping you wouldn’t catch me! I was up this morning early and I know I had seen this little picture and I thought it was in your house, so I just wandered around and looked through your cupboards.’” He described it to Mary’s mother who simply said, “Oh no, that’s at Ann Marsh’s.” Rockwell replied, “All right, I’ll go to the Marsh’s,” and bade them good day.

The Connoisseur

Forty-six years after his first Post cover, Rockwell embraced modern art. “I attended some classes in modern art techniques. I learned a lot and loved it.”

And he had fun playing Jackson Pollock for this 1962 cover (the scrawled red “JP” in the upper right is a tribute to Pollock). He put the canvas on the floor, dipping into paints and splashing them far and wide. It happened that a worker was painting the windows of his studio, and the artist invited him to help. The man climbed to the top of a ladder and obligingly dumped a can of white paint on the canvas below. One can’t help but wonder whatever happened to the laborer who actually helped Norman Rockwell paint a Post cover! As for whatever happened to the original “Rockwell-Pollock,” it is in the private collection of a gentleman named Steven Spielberg.

The Post has a larger-than-life version of Rockwell’s The Connoisseur in our Indianapolis headquarters. Check it out here.

Shoveling Floral Shop Sidewalk

“It was cold in New York,” Post editors say of this John Falter (1910-1982) cover, “and the cagey artist did most of his investigating behind glass, riding up and down on a Madison Avenue bus.” Painting the scene, Falter figured the frozen-faced workers would get an ironic chuckle from the fact that inside the flower shop window it is spring. Or perhaps not. Editors also had to note that Falter delivered his picture to the Post “just before the first of the winter’s oversize snowstorms hit New York. Then the artist hauled out for Arizona, where you may enjoy scenes like this in comfort.”

Springtime, 1935 Boy with Bunny

“You can’t buy a straw hat and make it look old by rubbing dirt in it,” Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) wrote in My Adventures as an Illustrator. “A hat has to be worn in the sun and sweated in and sat on and rained on. Then it’ll be old. And look it.” In 1935 Rockwell was asked to illustrate Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and he took the costuming very seriously. Desperately needing the right hat for Huck, he found just the thing in, appropriately, Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s hometown. He spotted “a man walking along the road wearing a straw hat in a beautiful state of decay” and managed to buy it from him. Before long he ended up with a carload of clothes, “all old and rotten, battered, tattered, and splotched.”

Folks around Hannibal no doubt talked for a long time about that crazy guy who paid good money for their old duds, but the book illustrations were done to everyone’s satisfaction. And, like the boy greeting spring (left) with his worn hat and raggedy pants, some Post covers reflected the “Huck Finn look.”

Reading Among the Blossoms

Despite the fact that F. Sands Brunner (1886-1954) was very much a rugged outdoorsman who enjoyed camping, canoeing, and mountain climbing, most of his paintings reflect domesticity with adorable children and lovely women. This 1936 work from Post sister publication Country Gentleman is a case in point. The rich color and skillful use of lighting are typical of Brunner’s work. The Boyertown, Pennsylvania, native painted three Country Gentleman and two Post covers.

Appalachian Rhododendrons

Nature took over on a grand scale in most of John Clymer’s (1907-1989) 80 Post covers, and people were secondary. In fact, the viewer almost has to squint to see the family consisting of Dad with baby on his back, Mom in straw hat, and daughter leading them along the trail to Craggy Pinnacle near Asheville, North Carolina. Clymer told Post editors, “Sections of the trail wind through 10-foot-high rhododendrons, and the ground is carpeted with the rich pink petals of the flowers that have fallen.”

“These floriferous slopes look their best in mid-June,” editors noted in 1961, “as they did when the Catawba and the Cherokee held sway in the Carolinas. But if the scenery of the area has not changed much, the people have. What self-respecting Indian brave would have toted a papoose on his back?”

Hardware Store at Springtime

Artist Stevan Dohanos (1907-1994) loved hardware stores, and editors informed us that “the store he has painted affectionately for this week’s cover is a composite of many where Dohanos himself has obeyed the impulse, very strong in the spring, to buy a lot of new garden tools.” They warned, however, “this equipment buying is by all odds the most popular phase of gardening, for on a bland spring day there is nothing like the feel of a good rake or hoe in your hand—in the hardware store.”

Ready to Garden

This gentleman has made his trip to the hardware store and is hauling those spring purchases, lawn mower and all, back by public transportation. Perhaps more surprising is that the illustration is by the great J.C. Leyendecker, the man responsible for those chiseled Arrow Collar men who “haunted several generations of less fortunate-mankind,” according to David Rowland in a 1973 issue of the Post. In Leyendecker’s 40-plus years with The Saturday Evening Post, he showed amazing versatility as an illustrator, depicting subjects varying from elegant to comical in more than 300 covers.

First Flower

On a blustery March day a man excitedly spies that first crocus peeking through. The man is Gene Pelham, who as a youth had met Rockwell and occasionally modeled for him while living in New Rochelle, New York.

But in 1938, Marcy Kennedy Knight writes in the March/April 2013 issue of the Post, Pelham moved from New York, filled with visions of a country life. When settled, he dreamed of doing some farming in Arlington, Vermont. But a funny thing happened on the way to his dream. Knight writes that Pelham was in his yard one day when a man seeking directions pulled into his driveway and rolled down his window. Pelham looked up and “was amazed to see none other than Rockwell behind the wheel. ‘Norman? What are you doing here?’ he asked.”

What the artist was doing was moving to Arlington too. “Rockwell was delighted to find Pelham living in Arlington when he and his family arrived, and soon hired him as his studio assistant,” Ron Schick writes in Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. Pelham “built props, prepared canvases, wrangled models, and was himself a versatile and expressive model,” continues Schick. “The relationship was mutually beneficial: Pelham grew as an illustrator as he learned from his mentor, and Rockwell gained from Pelham’s considerable range of talents.”

Plumbers

Plumbers was one of Rockwell’s most entertaining covers. Pelham (right) and Rockwell’s apprentice Don Winslow are typecast as Laurel and Hardy like characters cutting up in a fancy boudoir, much to the confusion of the Pekingese to the right. Rockwell’s passion for detail works a wonderful contrast between the room with it’s floral wallpaper and frilly vanity and the laborer with their dirty hands and well-used tools. There’s a good chance that Pelham was the one who located the tools. He was key to acquiring props for the artist.

“Dad never threw anything away,” Pelham’s daughter Melinda said in a recent Post interview. “Norman would get these things and say, ‘Here, Gene, take this. I don’t want it.’ I think that’s why he liked my dad so much because my dad could always come up with whatever it was he needed.”

Melinda has had fun over the years, looking at Rockwell’s paintings and recognizing various items. “A lot of the props he would drag from our house. Sometimes I see things in Post covers that are either things I had or someone in my family had.” For example, in Rockwell’s 1943 April Fool cover Melinda recognized the table (“it was my grandmother’s”), the chairs, and the clock that she still owns today.

A more famous prop was Rockwell’s chair, depicted in the cover Blank Canvas. After many years of use, the artist threw the chair out, but Pelham retrieved it and took it home. “Dad used it when he did his own painting,” from then on Melinda told us. And who wouldn’t? After all, America’s favorite illustrator created many iconic images while sitting in that old seat.

New Chair

“My father was a landscape painter mostly,” Melinda says. “My mother used to say ‘You should paint more,’ but he didn’t.” Although he did a “few covers for the Post and Collier’s,” it was difficult to make a living at commercial illustration. The competition was great for magazine and advertisement art, and there was certainly no competing with Rockwell, who was at the pinnacle in these venues. Besides, Melinda says, “Norman kept him busy.”

By the time Pelham created this colorful 1942 cover, it was apparent that his move to Vermont’s countryside was the beginning of a trend. That February, the Post noted another of their illustrators, Mead Schaeffer, had “joined Norman Rockwell and Gene Pelham at Arlington, Vermont, in what promises to become a Post art colony.” They were prophetic words, for the tiny town would soon boast fellow cover artists John Atherton and George Hughes. These renowned illustrators socialized and consulted each other on their projects. We can see the influence of Hughes’ humorous everyday situations and Rockwell’s sense of fun in Pelham’s beleaguered moving man.

The Babysitter

We would like to say that no babies were harmed in the making of this classic Rockwell cover, but the baby may disagree. During Melinda’s first modeling job, as the crying infant in The Babysitter, the artist and photographer couldn’t get her to cry, so someone stuck her foot with a pin. “My mother told me she always felt terrible about that, but it was what it was.”

“Obviously I was too small to remember anything,” she says. “But somewhere I have a photograph of me that Dad took … and I can see my mother’s image. She’s standing and I’m looking at her, and I am sort of looking sad like, ‘Oh, help me!’” Like many illustrators of the period, Rockwell began by painting live models. But around the mid 1930s, he used photography to capture the scene he would sketch out for a painting, calling the model back if necessary.

The Babysitter shows Rockwell’s ability to capture a dizzying array of details, making it one of those paintings where viewers may pick up something new each time they look at it. And still Melinda brought a fresh detail to our attention: “There’s a pin, an actual pin in the painting. The pin is in the diaper that’s hanging over the chair. He put it right through the canvas, he didn’t paint that in there.” It’s a delightful bit of Rockwell whimsy we were unaware of. Melinda has another viewpoint: “When I found out that I was stuck by a pin and I look at that painting, I wonder if that was the pin that did the deed and then he put it in the picture,” she says, laughing.

Despite the prickly offense, Melinda has a good sense of humor about the situation. In fact, she says she (along with the model baby sitter, Lucille Towne Holton) got involved in keeping the painting where the artist wanted it to be. Rockwell gave the original to the sixth graders of Taft Elementary in Burlington, Vermont, in memory of a student who died of leukemia. The school closed in 1978, and the painting was stored in a local bank. In 1995 appraisers determined it would be worth about $300,000. This was welcome news to the cash-strapped school system, which considered an auction. Former classmates protested and were offered an alternative: raise $300,000 and the painting would remain in town. Many townspeople got involved, and Melinda reports, “We raised the funds and it stays forevermore! It’s at the Fleming Museum; and every time my granddaughter goes there, she says, ‘That’s my grandmother!’ She gets a kick out of it.”

Rockwell Ads

We first saw Melinda on a recent episode of Antiques Roadshow, where she was having Rockwell artifacts appraised, including a print of this 1950 Du Mont TV ad featuring her at about age 5. The print was accompanied by a note addressed to her father: “…to reimburse your daughter for the long session of posing. Give her my thanks for helping me out. Sincerely, Norman.” We called to ask her about her memories of the artist.

“I do remember him! I remember very well,” Melinda says, although she was only about 5 or 6 when he moved away from her small town in Vermont. “My sister always says to me, ‘I don’t know how you remember all that, I don’t remember these things.’ Maybe I just paid more attention or maybe I just have a different brain. And my sister didn’t pose for him that often.”

What she remembers was a kind man with a fondness for Cokes. This was a treat because soft drinks were limited to “special occasions” at home. But Rockwell had a Coke machine and the models could help themselves on breaks.

Melinda also recalls that Rockwell was particular about the pose he wanted for this ad. “He was very detailed in the way he wanted you to sit,” she says. And sit she did, for 15 hours. The time “would be broken up,” Melinda says, “so he might be working with the boy or the dog, and they didn’t need me” for a while. She remembers the artist’s wife Mary Rockwell who “would take me into the house so I wasn’t just sitting in the studio all that time. She was great about leaping into the breach. I can remember getting a dish of ice cream.”

“It was a long day,” Melinda says, “but Mary took me on a walk. I remember we walked down the back road, and it was a dirt road that ran along the river. And I remember picking ferns with her and then we went back to her garden and got some zinnias.” Melinda’s mother was laid up with an injury at this time, “and I brought her home this bouquet of flowers that Mary had ‘helped’ me put together. She did it all herself, I was very small, but I remember picking the ferns. She was really very sweet. She was a lovely lady. I have very fond memories of being there as a child.”

Blank Canvas

Painting and drawing appraiser Alasdair Nichol was a bit surprised when Melinda also brought a chair to his table at the Antiques Roadshow, suspecting she had been sent to the wrong area. But when Melinda explained that the chair had belonged to Norman Rockwell and had been depicted in the iconic 1938 cover we see here, he understood. Rockwell’s photographer, Gene Pelham (Melinda’s dad), took the chair after the artist threw it out.

“Dad never threw anything away,” Melinda says. He would salvage discards or “Norman would get these things and say, ‘Here, Gene, take this. I don’t want it.’ Norman was not a hoarder or collector, I don’t think, unless it was something he felt he would need in the long run for paintings—costumes and things.”

But the salvaged chair was special. “To think of the amazing paintings that he did when he was sitting in this chair,” appraiser Nichol said. To see how the cast away chair was evaluated, we have a link to the appraisal, courtesy of the Antiques Roadshow.

Thank you to the Antiques Roadshow for the link to the episode featuring Melinda and to the Norman Rockwell Museum for their assistance in contacting her.

Overheard Lovers

Even the most bookish gent can find real life more intriguing than the printed word. This fun but often overlooked 1936 cover is a good example of Norman Rockwell’s droll sensibilty. The set-up was simple: two plain park benches, a disinterested pooch and no background scene to detract from our bookworm’s delightful expression. Rockwell often painted dogs, but it was usually the same spotted mutt that fit in well with his active freckle-faced kids. At one point Post publisher, George Horace Lorimer, asked the artist, “Why do you always use the same mutt in your covers?” Rockwell replied, “I have a good dog and he’s a good model, and I use him because it’s easier.” However, here he used a small, well-dressed breed to go with its rather foppish master.

Fall Gossip Session

Love is “a condition brought by spring, the glory of autumn, the humidity of summer, winter’s exhilaration or paralysis, and other odd manifestations of nature,” noted Post editors of this 1953 cover. In this quaint autumn painting, artist Constantin Alajalov (1900-1987) focused on three neighbors who seem quite fascinated by a budding romance. A refugee from the Russian Revolution, Alajalov arrived in New York in 1923 and worked his way up painting murals in restaurants to his first New Yorker cover within three years. He painted 73 Post covers from 1945 to 1962.

Eavesdropping on Love

Words of love are in the air, and Post editors speculated they went something like this: “It seems like we’re alone on a desert island. Just you and me and the sun and the surf.” But the lovebirds on Amos Sewell’s 1960 cover have company. “There’s another young couple in the vicinity,” editors noted, “and this mushy discussion positively fractures them.”

The need for cover illustration was waning in the early 1960s, as the Post was going with photographs in order to modernize the magazine’s look. Amos Sewell, who illustrated the first of his 45 covers in 1949, created his final one in 1962. During the ’40s and ’50s, Sewell also produced hundreds of story illustrations for the Post and its sister publication, The Country Gentleman.

Father and Time

No real farmer sees a clock at this advanced hour. Editors of Country Gentleman, from the same publisher as the Post, said of this 1946 painting, “Griffith may have been thinking of his own design for living when he painted this nine-o’clock farmer.” Echoed the artist: “I am originally from Nashville, Tennessee, and was brought up under the quaint old Southern theory that nothing is quite as important as a man’s politics, hot buttermilk biscuits, and plenty of sleep.”

This cover is one of seven Griffith did for Country Gentleman and the weather-hardened farmer with a soft spot for animals is reminiscent of Rockwell’s beloved Farmer and the Bird (below).

Farmer and the Bird

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) was a New York City slicker who loved depicting the ideal rural life. Notable among his country scenes were the 15 covers of Cousin Reginald, a city boy visiting his country cousins, that the artist did for our sister publication, Country Gentleman.

The contrast between the ruggedness of the farmer and his gentleness with the fledgling make this 1923 cover an endearing work. “If you are interested in the characters that you draw,” Rockwell said, “and understand them and love them, why, the person who sees your picture is bound to feel the same way.”

Basket of Kittens in the Barn

This 1924 cover of a farmer’s predicament was typical of the lighthearted themes depicted by artist Reginald Bolles (1877-1967). This was one of four Country Gentleman covers by the Cape Cod native who also did one Saturday Evening Post cover. In addition to book illustrations, Bolles also illustrated covers for Modern Priscilla (1887-1930), a women’s publication.

Snowy Farm Scene

Far-flung relatives begin gathering for the holidays in this cheerful 1953 cover by Charlotte Joan Sternberg (1920-2003). Charming scenes of the New England countryside were a common theme for this Connecticut-born artist, but this farm was really close to home.

Her neighbor, dairyman Clayton Robert Hall, whose family had farmed the 140 acres near Meriden since the early 1800s, guided the artist through the farm, which she began to paint the previous summer when the surrounding landscape was still green. The photo below shows the artist and farmer, along with a couple of disinterested cows, consulting on the illustration destined to become a magazine cover.

Best known for her Americana landscapes, many of which can be viewed at The Art of Charlotte Joan Sternberg website; she was a successful commercial artist and painted portraits, including one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The Baby Carriage

In his early 20s, Rockwell was an illustrator and art editor for Boys’ Life magazine. But, according to Rockwell in My Adventures as an Illustrator, he was tired of being accepted only by children’s publications and fed up with seeing “the Rover Boys and their lousy dog with the Mounted Police” on his easel. He dreamed of his art on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post; the thought of having his paintings viewed by millions excited daydreams of being famous: “surrounded by admiring females, deferred to by office flunkies at the magazines, wined and dined by the editor of the Post, Mr. George Horace Lorimer.” But that was the rub. Twenty-two-year-old Rockwell was petrified by the thought of approaching “the baron of publishing” who had “built the Post from a two-bit family magazine with a circulation in the hundreds” to a major publication with millions of readers. He had heard the publisher was tough. What if Lorimer didn’t like his work?

Rockwell had a friend named Clyde Forsythe, a cartoonist who knew his way around the world of commercial art. Forsythe was also straightforward. He was the only person Rockwell knew who wouldn’t just ooh and ah over his work, but would give an honest evaluation. He visited Rockwell one day and found the dejected artist lying on a cot in his studio. He asked Rockwell what was eating him, and Norman “hemmed and hawed but finally told him.” Forsythe’s advice: “‘Stop chewing on your tongue and do a cover. What the hell, you’re as good as anybody. Lorimer’s not the Dalai Lama.’”

So Rockwell did a couple of paintings, both attempts to mimic the high society images the Post favored at the time: one a romantic scene with a debonair pair of lovers in the style of Charles Dana Gibson and the other a beautiful ballerina curtsying under a spotlight. Forsythe returned and denounced them as “‘C-R-U-D, crud,’” noting Rockwell was a guy who just couldn’t paint beautiful women. Then he snatched up one of the illustrations Rockwell had just completed for a story in Boys’ Life. “‘Do that,’ said Clyde. ‘Do what you’re best at. Kids. You’re a terrible Gibson, but a pretty good Rockwell.’”

It was sound advice. On his first meeting with Post Art Editor Walter M. Dower, Rockwell sold two paintings (The Baby Carriage and The Circus Strongman) and had three sketches for future covers approved (including Gramps at the Plate). Though his work had been OK’d by Lorimer, Rockwell had yet to meet the publisher; instead it was Dower who informed him that he would receive $75 for each cover. Rockwell’s monthly salary as art director and illustrator for Boys’ Life was $50; he was over the moon. His first cover The Baby Carriage appeared on May 20, 1916.

(The story above was adapted from My Adventures as an Illustrator by Norman Rockwell.)

The Circus Strongman

1916 was something of a golden year for America. The economy was good and it was the last year before the U.S. entered into World War I. And boys dreamed of becoming the great strongman, Eugen Sandow. Showman Florenz Ziegfeld made a star of Sandow, who would lift weights, pose, and even break chains across his chest for audiences. Edison Studios did a short film of Sandow posing and flexing. This was the stuff of dreams for young boys.

Posing children would be a challenge to any artist, and getting a child to maintain a pose long enough to sketch the scene was difficult. But Rockwell had a way of dealing with the restlessness. At the beginning of each modeling session with kids, he set a stack of nickels on a table next to the easel. Every 25 minutes, he would take 5 nickels from the stack and set it aside, telling the model, “Now, that’s your pile.” Five cents in 1916 would be about a dollar in today’s money, and watching the coins pile up was great motivation. The model for “Sandow” was Billy Paine, who posed as all three boys in The Baby Carriage above. Rockwell used Paine in several Post covers. Sadly, Paine died at age 13; he’d been horsing around a second-story window and fell. “He was the best kid model I ever used” Rockwell said.

Gramps at the Plate

The young artist still hadn’t met the powerful publisher, George Horace Lorimer, but was dealing with Walter Dower, the art editor. Rockwell’s first two finished paintings were accepted without any changes, but when Rockwell submitted his third painting—the baseball-playing grandfather—he found out being a Post cover artist wasn’t so easy after all. In My Adventures as an Illustrator, Rockwell tells the story of this cover:

“Mr. Dower brought word out that Mr. Lorimer thought the old man was too rough and tramplike. Would I do the painting over? Of course. I stretched a new canvas and began again. ‘Better,’ said Mr. Dower. ‘Mr. Lorimer thought it was better. But the old man’s too old, he thought.’ I did the painting over again. The boy was too small. I did that painting over five times before Mr. Lorimer accepted it.”

Later, Lorimer informed Rockwell that he had been testing him. Why? To test the new artist’s versatility, his ability to take direction, his perseverance, or maybe just to see if Rockwell would do his bidding. Whatever the reason for the test, the ordeal almost caused the young artist to give up: “I wonder if he ever knew how near I came to flunking his test.”

Woman with Basketball

Very little is known today about Norwegian-born illustrator Carol Aus (1878-1934) except that she was known for portrait painting. That talent shines through in this 1909 basketball player.

The Post published seven of Aus’ portraits, all of which appeared on the cover.

Schoolgirl Primping

This pretty cover girl, whose only concern is looking good in a new hat, was created the same year Albert Einstein was lecturing about his new theory of relativity in Stahr’s home state, New York. As a longtime resident of Long Island, Stahr (1883-1953) was close to the East Coast’s publishing companies, and he took full advantage of it. He illustrated for Life and Colliers and was versatile enough to become known as a pulp magazine artist.

The pulps were inexpensive fiction magazines popular from the 1890s through the 1950s (they were printed on cheap paper from wood pulp, hence the name). From 1924 to 1934, Stahr created a number of covers for Argosy magazine, a pulp that boasted authors such as Upton Sinclair and Zane Grey.

Movie Star

The Saturday Evening Post had reached its 3-million-circulation milestone just before this cover was published. Rockwell liked to have fun with the familiar logo, and in this case, he obscured part of it with dormitory regulations. The rules state that male companions are not allowed in the dorm at any time, but with a stash of movie-star photos, these teenagers have found a loophole. The idol in hand is actor Robert Taylor, who made millions of female hearts beat faster in his starring role opposite Greta Garbo in Camille. Movie magazines were just then becoming a national pastime—at least among teenage girls, who were trading and swooning over glossy photos of the current heartthrobs.

Rockwell created several covers that included pictures within a picture. Another example of this is The Great Debate, where the newspapers in the illustration clearly show 1948 presidential candidates Truman and Dewey.

March Band at Football Game

Playing an energetic march while keeping a close eye on the game requires dexterity only a teenager can manage, but Stevan Dohanos made sure the rest of us could watch the game in the tuba’s reflection.

Dohanos began this 1946 painting by filling his Westport, Connecticut, home with equipment borrowed from a local high school band. “The tough job,” he said, “was keeping my guests away from the instruments.” Post editors reported “almost everyone who dropped in while Dohanos was at work turned out to be a former musician, the kind who hasn’t laid lip to a trombone for 10 years, but is sure he hasn’t lost the old knack or wants to see if he can still play the second-coronet part from ‘Under the Double Eagle.’”

Fortunately for Post readers, Dohanos did get the job done, and he learned a lesson about his visitors in the process: “I never knew my friends had so much musical talent, or lacked so much.”

Father’s Homework

Of this 1960 cover Post editors asked the question, “If one furrow-browed father spends x hours failing to solve the quadratic equations of one boy, how long would it take two furrow-browed fathers to fail to solve the quadratic equation of two boys?”

Though artist John Falter (1910-1982), a self-proclaimed “dunce in algebra,” may have struggled to find a solution for x, he never struggled to find work as an artist.

He was described by the Post as a workhorse sketching six days a week from 3:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. When he entered the Navy during World War II, he found a way to continue his career: he designed more than 300 posters and other recruitment materials for the military. The same year he enlisted, he created his first of 125 covers for the Post.That prodigious output continued throughout his life; it is estimated that he completed more than 5,000 paintings.