Norman Rockwell, the famed painter and iconic cover artist for The Saturday Evening Post, grew up in a hard, tough tenement neighborhood in Manhattan where he would sit on the rooftops and watch the street gangs bloody each other. A far cry from the pictures he painted that still provide a comfort and ease most never experienced. Including Rockwell.
Though many of the pictures are unrealistic of how Americans truly ever lived, they create in the viewers a sense of the way things should be....
That old friends still get together.
That the worst case a doctor can treat is a black eye.
That grandmothers still pray at public restaurants with their grandsons.
And even that the nerdy guy can still get the girl(s).
Every picture told a story. Rockwell gave us the beginning, middle, or end, respectively. The rest was up to us. And we knew that no matter what point we came into the tale it would have a happy ending.
Rockwell's pictures are pure escapism, but they are a calming and hopeful one; a reminder of a simpler, kinder world...even if that world never truly existed. I still find that every once in a while it helps to turn off the news, close my laptop, put down one of the myriad books in the reading stack, pick up one of the several coffee-table-sized collections of Rockwell's work and get lost in the story for a few minutes.
Some favorites I hope you enjoy as much as I do:
