final painting (Buechner, Artist, 44). Rockwell used foreground invitation in many of his works. Foreground invitation meansthat the picture suggests that the viewer is entering the picture and into the scene. Valentine, 3Rockwell’s subject matter is average America. For his first 30 years, he paintedscenes of the country, childhood embarrassments, discomforts and humiliations (Buechner, Retrospective, 44). He also painted for advertisements during his this period. For exampleFisk Bicycle Tires and Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. During thetwenties, Rockwell became rich and famous. He became the top cover artist for theSaturday Evening Post which his work appeared almost every month. During the twenties,he also took on more advertising jobs, at twice the fee of a Saturday Evening Post cover(Buechner, Retrospective, 46). During his appearances on the Post during the twenties, heintroduced many new subjects, and several characters that would reappear which wherebums, sheriffs, musicians and doctors (Buechner, Retrospective, 52). 1935 to 1939 were the years when Rockwell’s finest art was done (Buechner,Retrospective, 61). Rockwell had stopped using real models and started to turn moretoward photographs. This helped him to create a more life like subject because thephotograph stays still, a model tends to turn around. He produced sixty-seven SaturdayEvening Post covers during the thirties, far less than he did in the twenties but more thanany other artist. His most important works of this time was an 8 piece color set forHuckleberry Finn in 1935. Rockwell took this job with enthusiasm because he had achance to participate in the tradition to illustrate different scenes in classical works, notstories he made up on his own (Buechner, Retrospective, 75). Rockwell’s art was a big part of the war effort in the forties. A series of paintingscalled the Four Freedoms explained what the war effort was all a...
