Norman Percevel Rockwell was born on Feb. 3, 1894 in New York, New York. As a boyhe grew fond of the country, where he moved to a few years after he was born, and stayedaway from the city as much as he could, which would later be shown in his works(Buechner, Retrospective, 24). When he was 14, he had to commute to New York Citytwice a week to attend the Chase School of Fine and Applied Art. After awhile hedropped out of his sophomore year of high school, and became a full time student at TheNational Academy School (Buechner, Artist, 38). He illustrated his first Saturday EveningPost cover on May 20, 1916, which was his first big break. Norman Rockwell says, “Ifone wants to paint covers for the Post, one must begin by accepting certain limitations. The cover must please a vast number (no matter how: by amusing, edifying, praising; butit must please); it must not require an explanation or caption to be understood; it musthave an instantaneous impact (people won’t bother to puzzle out a cover’s meaning)”(The Norman Rockwell Album, 29). More people have seen Rockwell’s work, mostly onthe covers on the widely circulated Saturday Evening Post, more than all ofMichelangelo’s, Rembrandt’s, and Picasso’s put together, estimated by Life magazine(Walton 7).Rockwell creates his pictures in separate stages. First he makes a loose rough draftof his idea. Second, he gathers costumes, props and models. Rockwell’s models areusually his friends, because he knows them and likes them (Walton 16). Later on inRockwell’s lifetime he would stray away from using real models, he would usephotographs to do this step instead. He would take either sketches or pictures and thenpaint them onto canvas. Next he draws individual parts of the picture. Fourth, he wouldsketch the whole drawing in great detail. Fifth, he would put color into his sketches, andsixth he would put all the parts together into the...
