Illustrating our ‘Four Freedoms’
Submitted photo
My husband and I toured New England in 2017, visiting six states in seven days. One of the places we were anxious to visit was the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.
For those of you too young to remember, Norman Rockwell was a prolific painter of Americana. He was born in New York in 1897 and died in 1978 in Stockbridge after producing over 4,000 paintings during his lifetime. His paintings graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post for 47 years.
He painted mostly characters in snippets of time, often in a humorous way. You and I would see a scene in real life and not think anything about it, but he had a way of taking a mental picture of that one scene and putting in on canvas. A couple examples that stand out in my mind are the ones with the mom and kids dressed up, with Bible under their arms, marching single-file off to church, while dad slumps down, still in his pajamas, in the easy chair reading the newspap
Clinton, Nixon era political cartoons showcased at Norman Rockwell Museum masslive.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from masslive.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
STOCKBRIDGE - Nearly a century after English author Charles Dickens penned A Christmas Carol, Norman Rockwell found inspiration in the literary classic.
For the Dec. 15, 1934 cover of The Saturday Evening Post, the famed American illustrator chose to portray the novel s characters Tiny Tim sitting atop Bob Cratchit s left shoulder.
At Cratchit s feet, Tiny Tim s famous line: God bless us everyone.
The Rockwell-Dickens connection seems a natural, according to Tom Daly, curator of education at the Norman Rockwell Museum. As a little boy, Rockwell s dad read Dickens stories to him, Daly said. Both [the artist and writer] give interesting details in their works that often tell a much larger story.
STOCKBRIDGE â Andre Trenier got as close as he could to the originals of the artist he long studied and admired.
âIt was all a kind of very nerdy process of my just studying every last detail,â Trenier, a Bronx, N.Y.-based muralist and illustrator, said about his January trip â it was his first â to the Norman Rockwell Museum.
He was particularly struck, he said, by the Rockwellian-ness of the Berkshires: âIt was kind of surreal.â
Rockwellâs appeal, his artistry and his documenting of crucial moments in Black history continue to flow into new places, new generations. And the towering icon of Americana and all its joys and travails recently connected Trenier with someone who also is inspired by Rockwell â in the Bronx.