Ellen Pyle (1876-1936) was known for her beautiful use of color. In 1927, she received a note from fellow cover artist Norman Rockwell about how much he liked her Post covers. “They are dandy. So full of color and so broadly painted. Believe me I envy you the latter quality particularly,” he wrote, according to Delaware Art Museum’s Illustrating Her World: Ellen B. T. Pyle.

As in many of her 40 covers for the Post, the model is one of Pyle’s children. In this case, teenage daughter Caroline is taking a wheelbarrow break from gardening duties.

“When summer rolled around,” wrote Post editors of this 1946 cover, “and the grass in Westport, Connecticut, began to grow as fast as a small boy’s hair, Stevan Dohanos recalled one of the duties of his youth and how mowing the lawn can ball up a man’s more important engagements.”

The frame house, however, was not in Connecticut, but back in artist Dohanos’ (1907-1994) hometown of Lorain, Ohio. Editors noted that he sketched it a couple years before it appeared on the cover. “Obviously it was a good stage, a good setting, but he never had decided just what story to tell against this background. Now he uses it to tell of a common summertime crisis—when the star pitcher has to work,” Post editors wrote.

Illustrator George Hughes (1907-1990) was an avid outdoorsman, but we’re not sure how he felt about planting trees. He would probably feel the same as the poor guy from the local nursery on this 1955 cover, if he had to deal with an indecisive homeowner.

Hughes painted 115 Post covers, and was especially productive in the 1950s. Typical output for the more popular illustrators was around 40 to 50 covers during a decade. Hughes’ friend Norman Rockwell, for example, did 44 during this period. Hughes did 80 in this timeframe; mostly fun, slice-of-life scenes from midcentury suburban life.

View more in the George Hughes gallery.

Artist Thornton Utz (1914-2000) enjoyed gently bucking the trend and depicting the neighborhood nonconformist. Mr. Leisure in this 1957 cover uses his backyard purely for relaxation, not caring how high the grass gets.

Meanwhile, in nearby yards, neighbors are flummoxed by Mr. Leisure’s indifference—at least those who can spare a second from their suburban chores.

Even the little girl in the middle yard wastes no time as she tends to her dog’s bath. Post editors mused that the cover might start a debate “about whether people should nourish their backyards or let their backyards nourish them.” We’ll let the reader decide.

Moms today may not have to reenact the American Indian Wars with junior in the store aisles, but that doesn’t mean multitasking with a grocery list and an active toddler is any easier than it was 50 years ago.

Popular artist Dick Sargent was a master of what art experts have come to call “sitcom covers.” Editors noted of this 1956 cover that Sargent, just to prove it could be done, borrowed a little boy to fit into a paper bag. “He let the boy’s father do it to assure that he himself would not get scalped.”

Sargent’s adeptness with facial expressions told the story: the mom’s weariness, the shell-shocked look of the grocer, and an expression on the boy’s face that says, “My work is done here.”

“Once upon a time a very small boy stood on the roof of the garage behind his home,” Post editors wrote of 1953′s Learning to Fly (at right). “He had made every reasonable arrangement to fly down. He had carefully studied the aerodynamics of the situation and met them with the most scientific equipment available.”

The cover was a flashback to a Nebraska afternoon when artist John Falter himself was on the roof of his boyhood home, as his own mother agonized below. And the boy, who grew up to recreate the comical events of his childhood for the enjoyment of Post readers everywhere, eventually found his wings.

“What is lovelier than the glow of carefree joy in the faces of happy children?” asked Post editors of this 1952 illustration. “Will the lady on the cover have the heart to defend her food and change those expressions to the pinched melancholy of starvation? She will if she can make it across the room in time.”

Sargent had set the scene for Crashing Mom’s Card Party in his dining room with real pastries, testing the self-restraint of his three sons. “The mouths of those sons began to water,” wrote the editors, “They watered for a week. Two weeks. Three. Then the sons were released at the pastry. They ate it so fast they apparently did not notice it was petrified, claims the fiendish father.”

There is much to be said about good intentions, besides the road to you-know-where being paved with them. Adding to the tension in this piece, an apple waits in the unsuspecting Mom’s path (no doubt left by one of her good-intentioned little helpers).

“My main concern in doing Post covers was trying to do something based on my own experiences,” illustrator John Falter said. “I found my niche as a painter of Americana with an accent on the Middle West. I brought out some of the homeliness and humor of Middle Western town life and home life.”

Like Learning to Fly, this Falter cover is fraught with enough anxiety to make the viewer cringe for Mom (and Dad). While the artist conveys enough despair for us to recognize that the situation is distressing, the overall effect is humorous.

In addition to childhood’s predicaments, Falter depicted a wide range of subjects, including nature’s beauty and intricate bird’s eye views of cities.

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.

Sarah Stilwell-Weber

From 1904 to 1921, Sarah Stilwell-Webber (1878-1939) created 60 Saturday Evening Post covers, mostly of women and children. Her paintings of lavishly attired women tended toward the exotic and imaginative, like the lady with the leopard below. Her depictions of children, such as this 1911 cover, delightfully conveyed what fun it is to be a child. These depictions are perhaps why she was also a well-known children’s book illustrator.

Stilwell-Weber studied under the preeminent art instructor of the period, Howard Pyle. In addition to the Post, she illustrated for Country Gentleman, Collier’s, and Harper’s Bazaar. Stilwell-Weber remains a prominent name from the Golden Age of American illustration (1880s-1920s), when American periodicals were rich in artwork that could be mass-produced for the first time.

GALLERY:

Katharine Richardson Wireman

Lighting a party lantern for the 1924 Fourth of July celebration provides artist Katharine R. Wireman (1878-1966) an opportunity to work with soft light and shadows. Stilwell-Weber’s contemporary, Wireman created the first of her four Post covers in 1906. (Wiremen also painted 22 covers for sister publication, Country Gentleman.) Her works (below) emphasized carefree moments, and she often depicted her characters with rosy cheeks and joyful dispositions.

Wireman studied at the Drexel Institute under Howard Pyle in 1899. She then moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania, where she and a group of close-knit female artists, including Stilwell-Weber, began their illustration careers.

GALLERY:

Neysa McMein

By the Roaring ’20s, artist Neysa McMein (1890-1949) was very much a celebrity, mentioned or quoted in magazine articles, fiction, and in advertisements with some regularity. (A 1928 Post article on renowned violinist Jascha Heifetz tells how the musician and his entourage, stuck in a town where nothing for evening entertainment was open, made their way to Heifetz’s room, where he cleared the bed for a dice game and a cheerful shout came from Neysa McMein “whom one does meet in the oddest places,” according to the story.)

McMein was known to entertain other celebrities of the time, such as Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, and Dorothy Parker, note Walt and Roger Reed in The Illustrator in America 1880-1980. She lived in an apartment atop Carnegie Hall, writes drama critic David Finkle in an intriguing 2009 Huffington Post article, and she “was known for throwing open her digs to the rich or not-that-rich and famous.

“Furthermore, McMein had a reputation for being a libertine—or, at the very least, a very liberated lady,” writes Finkle. “…There’s an inherent irony here, too. In contrast with her free-spirit life, McMein’s women were the embodiment of innocence [as we see below in a few of her 62 Post covers]. … McMein was defining the American woman for McCall’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and other publications at the same time as chipping away at the image in her daily affairs.”

GALLERY:

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.

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.”

Devil May Care

Half of the 52 Post covers in 1942 were war-related: soldiers in action, girlfriends waiting at home, and so on. So this cover (left) was a special treat for two reasons. First, it was humorous and fun, and second, it was by America’s favorite artist. When Rockwell did a cover, thousands of additional issues were printed to meet the demand.

Rockwell sometimes used neighbors’ homes for the settings of his paintings. In a 1976 Post article, former Rockwell model Ann Morgan Baker (see The Missing Tooth in “Rockwell in the 1950s—Part I”) recalled that the artist “used to call my mother at 7 a.m. and say, ‘Don’t make the beds. I want to come and look at some messy rooms.’ Then he would come and wander through our morning rubble.”

Because Rockwell did not have a daughter, he probably used such a neighbor’s home to find this vanity with all the frills. Reportedly, middle son Tommy had to be bribed to pose for this 1942 cover, although it was noted that the mischief-maker was just the kind who would have read his sister’s diary—if he had a sister, that is.

War Stories

Norman Rockwell’s World War II covers were usually light and humorous, like the ones in his Willie Gillis series. A very fine exception to this was the serious depiction of a returning marine sharing his experiences at left. There is no bravado; no showing off. The grim reality of war permeates the gathering at the local garage.

As Rockwell’s life is well documented, we know most of the models in the garage are the artist’s Arlington, Vermont, neighbors and friends, including the actual shop owner, Bob Benedict (standing behind the marine). Sitting beside the marine is Rockwell’s youngest son, Peter. The blond boy standing up is Jerry, his oldest. The decorated soldier was real-life marine Duane Parks, whom Rockwell met in a nearby town. At times, uniform medals and ribbons were borrowed to dress up a scene, but the military decorations shown here belonged to Parks.

Rockwell enthusiasts will appreciate the artist’s attention to detail in this 1945 cover. In addition to the usual machine-shop equipment: gaskets, the large hook, etc., he included the Japanese flag; the newspaper clipping on the shop wall, which declares the marine a war hero; and the small flag with the blue star representing a family member serving in the armed forces. We see these starred flags not only in Post covers of the period, but also, for example, in movies. In Saving Private Ryan, Ryan’s mother has such a flag. A star was added for each family member in service; the blue signaled hope, and a gold star meant a loved one had died in service.

Readying for First Date

The young man at left getting ready for his big date is Tommy Rockwell, who is looking quite grown up compared to the little sneak he portrayed for a cover six years earlier (see Devil May Care, above). Tommy’s actual room in Arlington, Vermont, is the setting, and the woman giving him a hand is his real-life mother (Rockwell’s wife Mary). However, the artist of this domestic scene is not whom you’d expect. It’s Rockwell’s good friend George Hughes, who had moved to Arlington to join the small community of Post artists there. The artists often used the same neighbors, their families, and each other as models.

Hughes, though less well known than Rockwell, was the most prolific Post cover artist of this era—he produced 80 covers in the 1950s to Rockwell’s 45—and he had an unintended influence on one of Rockwell’s classic covers, Saying Grace (below).

Saying Grace

Intrigued by a fan’s description of an Amish woman and her grandson praying together in a cafeteria, Rockwell painted what is now one of his best-known works, Saying Grace (left). But this painting came very close to being abandoned before it was completed.

Rockwell told fellow Post artist George Hughes that he got so frustrated with the painting he threw it out his studio window, according to a 1992 article in the Post. When Hughes asked the theme, Rockwell described it as centering on several rough-looking fellows watching a woman saying grace in a diner. Hughes agreed it would never work. That comment was all it took to get Rockwell started again. He retrieved the painting from the snow and completed it. This became a long-running joke between the two artists: Rockwell would solicit Hughes’ opinion and then do the opposite.

The blond diner with his back against the window is Rockwell’s son, Jerry, looking much older than he did on the 1945 cover War Stories (above). On a sad note, the woman bowing her head, May Walker, did not live to see the cover; she passed away five days before it was published. Although she didn’t have the pleasure of enjoying the stir among her Arlington, Vermont, neighbors over her newfound fame, Rockwell assured Post editors that she derived a great deal of pleasure from the experience. When the painting was done, Walker was brought to Rockwell’s studio to view it. People who knew her well told the Post “her enjoyment of that day was one of the high moments of her life.”

The Soda Jerk

In his first attempt at this 1953 cover (left), the artist had painted a man in the immediate foreground and a woman with her son at the other end of the counter. He decided these people cluttered and confused the scene. Painting it again, Rockwell focused the attention on a teenaged soda jerk and his female admirers.

The idea came after Rockwell listened to his youngest son Peter’s tales of his summer soda-fountain job. Peter posed as the soda jerk, but he didn’t care for the finished painting. “I’m not that goofy-looking,” he said. Peter Rockwell appeared on the War Stories cover (above) and in Second Thoughts.

Today Peter Rockwell is a sculptor living in Italy and discusses his art in this video, courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Museum.

The Homecoming

The Homecoming at left is one of the great Rockwell covers featured in our special holiday issue, Norman Rockwell A Very Magical Christmas!. And it is magical indeed when an absent family member comes home for the holidays. All three of Rockwell’s sons are there—although we only see the back of his oldest son, Jerry, who is receiving a joyful hug from his mother Mary. To the left of Mary is son Tommy in the plaid shirt and to the far left is youngest son Peter wearing glasses. To Mary’s right, with that ubiquitous pipe, is America’s favorite artist, who enjoyed the occasional cameo in is own paintings (See “Rockwell Paints Rockwell”).

A family gathering needs a grandmother, and happy to pose for the role was none other than Grandma Moses. Rockwell wrote of Moses in his 1979 book, My Life as an Illustrator:

“After the war I became acquainted with Grandma Moses, the famous painter of American primitives. She had started painting seriously at the age of 67 after the death of her husband. Using dime-store brushes and house paint, she did scenes of country life which she remembered from her childhood.” Noting that she would do paintings of someone’s house for $10 or $15, Rockwell continued, “When I knew her, she was over 85 years old, a spry, white-haired little woman. Like a lively sparrow. She still painted in her bedroom on the third story of her farmhouse, using the same cheap brushes and house paint, though the paintings were selling rapidly for very good prices.”

The rest of the homecoming crowd consisted of Rockwell friends and neighbors, including the “twins” in the red jumpers—both were actually one little girl named Sharon O’Neill, whom Rockwell painted twice.