Norman Rockwell's Best-Known Covers

Norman Rockwell painted 321 covers for The Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1963. The best known are Rosie the Riveter (1943), Saying Grace (1951), Breaking Home Ties (1954) and the Triple Self-Portrait (1960) — plus Freedom from Want and The Problem We All Live With, neither of which was a Post cover at all.

The images everyone can picture

Rockwell's first Saturday Evening Post cover, Boy with Baby Carriage, ran on May 20, 1916. He was 22. The last, a portrait of John F. Kennedy, ran in 1963. In between he produced 321 covers for the magazine, and roughly a dozen of them have become the pictures Americans see when they try to remember the twentieth century.

Rosie the Riveter (May 29, 1943) is the most quoted. Rockwell's riveter eats her sandwich in a lunch break, rivet gun across her lap, one loafer resting on a copy of Mein Kampf. The pose is lifted almost exactly from Michelangelo's Isaiah on the Sistine ceiling — a deliberate joke about monumentality. The model was Mary Doyle, a 19-year-old telephone operator from Arlington, Vermont, whom Rockwell painted at roughly twice her actual build and later apologised to.

Saying Grace (24 Nov 1951) is the one Post readers themselves voted their favorite: a boy and an elderly woman praying in a crowded railway-station diner while two young men at the same table watch. Everything hangs on where the strangers are looking.

Triple Self-Portrait (13 Feb 1960) ran with the first installment of his autobiography. Rockwell paints himself, in a mirror, onto a canvas — and pins self-portraits by Dürer, Rembrandt, Picasso and Van Gogh to the canvas edge, which is either modesty or the opposite.

The Four Freedoms were not covers

The single most reproduced Rockwell, Freedom from Want, never appeared on a cover. It ran inside the Post on March 6, 1943 as one of four full-page illustrations, each paired with an essay, published across four consecutive issues: Freedom of Speech (February 20), Freedom to Worship (February 27), Freedom from Want (March 6) and Freedom from Fear (March 13).

They came out of Franklin Roosevelt's State of the Union address of January 6, 1941, and Rockwell's contribution was to make four political abstractions domestic. Freedom of speech becomes one man standing up at a town meeting. Freedom from want becomes a turkey being set down on a table — painted from photographs made at Rockwell's own Thanksgiving in 1942, with his cook, Mrs Thaddeus Wheaton, carrying the bird and his Vermont neighbors seated around it.

The Office of War Information, which had turned Rockwell down when he first offered the idea, then sent the paintings on a sixteen-city bond tour that raised something on the order of $130 million. That tour, not the magazine, is why the images entered the national vocabulary. It is also why Freedom from Want has been parodied more than any other American painting.

Nine Rockwells, with dates and the detail worth knowing

The Breaking Home Ties story is worth the detour. The cartoonist Don Trachte bought the painting, later made a copy of it, and hid the original behind a false wall in his Vermont house; the substitution was only discovered in 2006, after his death, when the original went to auction and sold for $15.4 million.

After the Post: Ruby Bridges and the reappraisal

Rockwell left the Post in 1963, after 47 years. The magazine's cover conventions had hardened around a narrow idea of American life, and he wanted subjects it would not run. Look gave him them.

On January 14, 1964 Look published The Problem We All Live With: Ruby Bridges, six years old, walking to William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans between four United States deputy marshals, past a wall marked with a thrown tomato and a racial slur. The marshals are cropped at the shoulders, so Bridges is the only complete human figure in the picture — the entire escort reduced to legs and armbands around a child in a white dress. It is the exact inverse of the warmth he was famous for, painted by the same hand, and it is now widely treated as his best work. In 2011 it hung outside the Oval Office, with Bridges present to see it.

He also produced Southern Justice (Murder in Mississippi) for Look in 1965, and a run of space-program illustrations. The critical rehabilitation that followed — Rockwell as an American realist rather than a calendar illustrator — dates largely from these later pictures.

How he actually worked, and what the market did next

From the late 1930s Rockwell built almost every picture from photographs. He cast local people — the postmaster, the doctor's son, a neighbor's daughter — posed them, shot dozens of frames, then assembled the final composition from several negatives. The faces in his Americana are not types; they are specific residents of Arlington, Vermont, and later Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the Norman Rockwell Museum now holds the largest collection of his originals.

In May 1943 his Arlington studio burned down, taking costumes, props, reference files and finished work with it. He rebuilt and kept working. The Post covers were never the whole job either: he painted the Boy Scouts of America calendar almost every year from 1925 into the 1970s, a fifty-year commission that ran alongside everything else.

The market caught up late. Breaking Home Ties made $15.4 million in 2006; Saying Grace made $46 million at Sotheby's in December 2013, a record for the artist. In 2017 the Berkshire Museum's decision to sell Shuffleton's Barbershop — a painting Rockwell had given the museum himself — triggered one of the loudest deaccessioning fights in American museum history.

Frequently asked questions

How many Saturday Evening Post covers did Norman Rockwell paint?

321, over 47 years. The first, Boy with Baby Carriage, ran on May 20, 1916 when Rockwell was 22; the last, a portrait of John F. Kennedy, ran in 1963, the year he left the magazine for Look.

What is Norman Rockwell's most famous painting?

Freedom from Want, the Thanksgiving table from the Four Freedoms series, is the most reproduced and most parodied. Rosie the Riveter and The Problem We All Live With are close behind, and critics increasingly name the latter as his best work rather than merely his most familiar.

Is Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter the same as the We Can Do It! poster?

No, and the two are constantly confused. Rockwell's Rosie is a 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover painting of a muscular riveter eating lunch with her rivet gun across her lap. We Can Do It! is a separate graphic by J. Howard Miller, made as an internal Westinghouse morale poster, which only became famous decades later.

What is the most expensive Norman Rockwell painting sold at auction?

Saying Grace, the 1951 Thanksgiving cover, sold at Sotheby's in December 2013 for $46 million, a record for the artist. Breaking Home Ties had made $15.4 million in 2006, shortly after the original was found hidden behind a false wall in the home of its owner.

Why did Norman Rockwell leave the Saturday Evening Post?

After 47 years he wanted to paint subjects the Post's cover conventions would not accommodate, civil rights above all. He moved to Look in 1963 and within a year had published The Problem We All Live With, his painting of Ruby Bridges being escorted to a desegregated New Orleans school.

Are Norman Rockwell images in the public domain?

Assume not. The great majority of his output remains in copyright and is licensed through his estate and the magazines that commissioned it, so authorised reproductions come through licensed channels rather than from open image files. Fine Art America carries a licensed Norman Rockwell collection on that basis.

Rockwell prints are licensed rather than freely reproduced, so the place to look is the authorised Norman Rockwell collection. Adjacent territory worth browsing: Saturday Evening Post covers by his contemporaries, Rosie the Riveter imagery, and mid-century American illustration generally.