Lesser-Known Facts About Norman Rockwell That Cast A Strange Light On His Iconic Paintings

Rockwell wrote in his 1960 autobiography, “I put everything into my work. A lot of artists do that: their work is the only thing they’ve got that gives them an identity. I feel that I don’t have anything else, that I must keep working or I’ll go back to being pigeon-toed, narrow-shouldered — a lump.” It’s an interesting, slightly saddening look into his mind. 

Rockwell had three wives throughout the course of his life. First was Irene O’Connor, who divorced him in 1921. Then came two women who were both called Mary — Mary Barstow, who died in 1959 while still married to Rockwell, and then Mary Punderson, who went by “Mollie”; she outlived him. Oh, and all three Mrs Rockwells were school teachers.

Among Rockwell’s most famous works is the painting Golden Rule, which shows people from all over the world gathered underneath the phrase, “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You.” A mosaic of the painting was gifted to the U.N. by Nancy Reagan in 1985 and it’s still there at the organization’s New York headquarters. Rockwell himself wrote in his autobiography he believed the United Nations to be “our only hope.”

Rockwell used ordinary people to model for his work, and his favorite of all of these was a girl named Mary Whalen. He wrote in his autobiography, “She was the best model I ever had, could look sad one minute, jolly the next.” Whalen herself told magazine the Saturday Evening Post in 2013, “There was something about the connection with Norman. Maybe it just came at the right time in my life.”

In 1979 Rockwell’s son Tom published a book titled The Best of Norman Rockwell, and within its pages he remembered his father’s work ethic, writing, “When I was young, we opened our presents early on Christmas morning, after which he would go out to the studio for a full day’s work.” So his sons might not have even seen him much on Christmas.

In 1966 Rockwell was hired to create promotional images for the Twentieth Century Fox movie Stagecoach. His art was shown on the end credits of the film, plus it was used for posters and various other advertisements. Oh, and he has a cameo in the movie too — he can be seen at a gambling table in the opening scene.

His autobiography revealed that while walking in a fairground as a young boy, Rockwell was spotted by a promoter and asked if he wanted to join in an act called “Amy the Wild Woman.” He agreed, and spent some time in front of an audience pretending to be caught and chewed on by “Amy”, who was actually a perfectly normal woman. Rockwell was terrified at first, but grew to like it, and got paid.

Rockwell’s first wife Irene asked for a divorce because, as Rockwell put it in his autobiography, “she had fallen in love with someone else.” Rockwell wasn’t entirely surprised, but he was angry, and when she confirmed she was going to leave he hurled an expensive china ornament at the wall.

Scholars have noticed that Rockwell seemed to take inspiration from European artists, including famous French painter Jean-Eugène Buland. His work also has a lot in common with that of J.C. Leyendecker, another artist for the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell was actually a pallbearer at Leyendecker’s funeral.

Rockwell’s father, Jarvis, had some artistic talent himself, although he didn’t end up making a career from it. The artist’s memoir recalled how his pa enjoyed copying pictures from magazines, and he taught the young Norman and his brother Jerry how to do this as well. They would spend the evenings drawing together at the family dining table.

Rockwell’s talent for drawing was evident pretty much right from the beginning of his life. According to website Artsper, at the age of just 14 he had earned a place at the New York School of Art, and then before he even turned 16 he’d been offered his first paid commission, a job illustrating a set of four Christmas cards.

In his autobiography Rockwell wrote, “One day in June 1917, as I was riding uptown on the subway, six or eight badly wounded merchant seamen boarded the train.” Their injuries shocked the young artist, and he decided right then to join up, writing, “By the time I left the train at New Rochelle, I’d made up my mind. I took a taxi to the Pelham Bay Naval Training and Receiving Center.”

Before becoming famous, Rockwell taught art to a wealthy actress named Ethel Barrymore, a woman he described in his autobiography as being “beautiful” and “very gracious.” If you recognize the name, that’s probably because Ethel was a member of the famous Barrymore acting dynasty and the great-aunt to Drew Barrymore. 

Like many other artists, Rockwell used photographic references to create his paintings. And he used a lot of them. He wrote in his autobiography, “I use… an average of a hundred photographs for a single Post cover. They are guides, nothing more. The essential ingredient in every one of my finished paintings is me — my feelings, ideas, skills.”

Rockwell was obviously a talented artist, but he was an incredibly prolific one as well. It’s thought that throughout his career he created no fewer than 4,000 paintings in all. They went far and wide across America, and even today “new” Rockwell paintings are being discovered in old buildings.

As per his memoir, Rockwell’s mother loved all things English and so named her son after Sir Norman Percevel, the man who apparently kicked Guy Fawkes out of the Tower of London during his famous gunpowder plot. She was also very insistent that Norman used his full name “Norman Percevel Rockwell” and spelt it correctly.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are both very big fans of Rockwell’s art, and when they’re not moviemaking they devote themselves to collecting his finest pieces. They lent some of the works in their possession to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2010 for the very popular “Telling Stories” exhibition.

Rockwell was known to clown around a little while in the military, and in his book he recounted an incident where a lieutenant commander told him, “You are a disgrace to the uniform you wear, an insult to your profession, your comrades in arms, and your country.” Rockwell realized then he wasn’t “going to be a crashing success as a sailor.”

Most people have at least a vague idea of what wartime icon Rosie the Riveter looks like. And it was Rockwell who gave us that image of the famous character. While J. Howard Miller created the world-famous “We Can Do It” poster, Rockwell’s picture of red-haired Rosie with her boot on Mein Kampf is the one most commonly associated with her.

As per Far Out magazine, music icon David Bowie badly wanted Rockwell to paint the cover for his album Young Americans. He went as far as calling the Rockwell house, only to be told by the artist’s wife that Rockwell would need at least six months to be able to finish the painting. So Bowie, to his regret, had to look elsewhere.

If you have a Norman Rockwell painting in your possession, you’re doing pretty well for yourself. Paintings for which Rockwell was paid only thousands have sold for millions in later years. The artwork Saving Grace was sold for a whopping $46 million in 2013. So be sure to keep an eye out for those lesser-known Rockwell works…

According to the Patriots Point website, when Rockwell went to join the U.S. Navy and fight in World War I, the service turned him away for being underweight. But he wasn’t about to give up that easily. Determined to fight, he ate a huge amount of donuts to put him over the weight limit and get him in. It worked.

In his autobiography Rockwell mused, “In one way or another, everything I have ever seen or done has gone into my pictures.” He offered as an example that one of his Christmas-themed Post covers was heavily inspired by his Uncle Gil, with whom he always associated “the old-fashioned spirit of Christmas.”

The young artist was absolutely right to think that the military wasn’t for him. Rockwell’s service record reads, according to him, “Rockwell is an artist and unaccustomed to hard manual labor. His patriotic impulse caused him to enlist in a rating for which he has no aptitude. Moreover, he is unsuited to naval routine and hard work.” Ouch!

One of Rockwell’s most important works is The Problem We All Live With, which depicts the young Ruby Bridges being escorted by police to her desegregated school. After it was published he reportedly received entire sacks of hate mail, some of which were downright threatening. Luckily, there were some letters of support as well.

Rockwell wrote in his autobiography, “When painting a Post cover I must tell a complete, self-contained story.” And he told these holistic tales not just once but a whopping 321 times. His partnership with the Saturday Evening Post lasted almost 50 years and established him as a major artistic talent.

Ever since childhood, Rockwell was a big fan of the works of Charles Dickens. In fact, the famous British author exerted a profound impact on him. He wrote in his autobiography, “I remember how I suffered with Little Dorrit in the Marshalsea Prison, had nightmares over Bill Sikes and Fagin, felt ennobled by Sydney Carton.”

Rockwell may have been discharged from the Navy for ineptitude, but he found another way to serve his country. His “Four Freedoms” set — Freedom from Fear, Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom of Speech — were sent around the United States and made $130 million, which went towards fighting World War II.

As per Smithsonian magazine, while Rockwell was unlucky in love with his first wife, he seemed to have fallen for his second wife Barstow almost immediately. He was visiting a friend in Los Angeles when he ran into the young woman, and he proposed to her after a mere two weeks. 

One of Rockwell’s pre-fame jobs was at an opera theater, but by his own admission he wasn’t very good at it. He told how among other things, he once accidentally disrupted a performance of Boris Godunov by hitting an actor with a heavy prop snowball. He recollected in his autobiography that he was always on the verge of being fired.

Rockwell passed away in 1978 aged 84, at his home in Stockbridge. But his legacy lived on long after that: in 2008 he was named the official state artist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after a campaign to give him the honor. The Norman Rockwell Museum is also located in Stockbridge — they’re very proud of him.

Rockwell’s parents were incredibly religious, but by today’s standards their devotion would seem way over the top. The artist’s memoir told how the young Norman and his brother weren’t allowed to play with toys or read comics on Sundays: it was set aside entirely for worship and the singing of hymns at the local cathedral.

In 1977 just one year before he passed away Rockwell was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. During the ceremony President Gerald Ford spoke of Rockwell’s “vivid and affectionate portraits of our country and ourselves” which had “become a beloved part of the American tradition.”

Nine years after Rockwell died, his sons Peter, Jarvis, and Thomas formed a company called the Norman Rockwell Estate Licensing Co. This wasn’t just to stop his work being misused — it was also to stop people sticking the Norman Rockwell name on pieces he never painted and so profiting from fraud.

Famous film mogul Samuel Goldwyn once asked Rockwell to paint a billboard for him, but Rockwell had some qualms about the costumes in which the actors were to be adorned: they weren’t historically accurate. When Rockwell pointed this out, Goldwyn was furious with him and the billboard was axed.

According to Rockwell’s sons, their father was never overly concerned about royalties from the books published of his works: he was more flattered than anything else. Thomas Rockwell told UPI in September 1987, “My father certainly didn’t realize that there would be this amount of interest in his work years after he had done it.”

Rockwell’s autobiography details an amusing incident from his youth. He and his friends rented a studio in a building full of “very pleasant girls,” but one day Rockwell’s father came to see him. He made sure the door was shut and asked him, “Do you realize that you have a studio in a house of prostitution?”

Rockwell had a specific vision of what he wanted to paint. He wrote in his autobiography, “The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.” Yet in his later years he began tackling more serious and difficult subjects.

Some of those who have studied Rockwell, including author Deborah Solomon, have suggested that he was a gay man forced to hide it because of the time he lived in. One thing they point to is that Rockwell had a close relationship with J.C. Leyendecker, who was openly gay himself. Allegedly these suggestions have angered Rockwell’s descendants, but the idea is still out there.

Barstow, the mother of Rockwell’s three children, suffered badly from depression. She spent time in a psychiatric institute in Stockbridge, though due to the mental health stigma of the day this wasn’t talked about much. In order to pay for this treatment, Rockwell took work painting advertisements, including his famous Kellogg’s ones.