Norman Rockwell

copyright- estate of Norman Rockwell

The Gossips is the culmination of Rockwell’s fascination with the subject of gossip - while he had painted works exploring this theme in the past, it was not until his immersion in the Arlington community that the final composition came to fruition. In the present work, Rockwell depicts 15 figures, each portrayed twice, as part of a chain receiving and passing on a tidbit of gossip. The attention he pays to naturalistic detail in these expressive portraits is exceptional, and the artist…

copyright- estate of Norman Rockwell

copyright- estate of Norman Rockwell

How did artists like Norman Rockwell, Austin Briggs, Jon Whitcomb, and others create the believable unique faces that can tell a whole story by themselves? In a magazine cover, like those by Rockwell and Stevan Dohanos, the image, with its setting and, most of all, its characters, must convey an anecdote without any help from words. So each face must be carefully crafted to do its part in creating the drama⸺or comedy.

copyright- estate of Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Mass.

For this work, Rockwell posed the young model at the top of the stairs in his own home and assembled a group of friends and neighbours downstairs. Once he was satisfied with the photos, Rockwell would return to his studio and combine his preliminary sketches with the photos to create a series of small-scale colour studies. These preliminary sketches allowed Rockwell to experiment with colour and provide a glimpse into the artist’s creative process. After executing several colour studies for…

The Runaway, a painting by Norman Rockwell

Rockwell created paintings that defined a generation, but the photographs that helped make them are just as fascinating.