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Norman
Rockwell (1894-1978)
Norman
Rockwell Norman
Percevel Rockwell
was born on February
3, 1894, in a Manhattan
brownstone. His
father was a New
York City textile
company executive
who sometimes copied
drawings for his
own amusement.
His mother was
a chronic invalid
whose father was
an artist sometimes
reduced to house
painting. There
were two children;
the elder son Jarvis,
a strapping athlete,
and Norman, who
was small for his
age and had to
wear eyeglasses
and corrective
shoes.
In 1902, the Rockwells moved from
New York City to suburban Mamaroneck.
Rockwell liked the country better
than the city and this preference
formed the basics for his later
paintings. By the time he was 14
he was taking art lessons. He dropped
out of high school in the middle
of his sophomore year to attend
the National Academy of Design
full time. At the tender age of
19 he was appointed the art director
of Boy's Life Magazine. On May
20,1916 Rockwell did the first
of his 322 Saturday Evening Post covers. This brought Rockwell into
the big time and that is where
he stayed for the next half century.
Norman Rockwell settled into Arlington, Vermont in 1939 and started to
produce some of his most famous
work. Oddly enough, four other
illustrators for the Saturday Evening
Post lived in that village of 1600
people, and there was a close bond
between them. During this period
Rockwell began to work more from
photographs. In the area around
Arlington he found many willing
models for his paintings. In The
Tattooist, Rockwell used one
of his fellow illustrators, Mead
Schaeffer as the tattooist and
a neighbor, Clarence Decker, as
the sailor. Above is one of the
photographs that Rockwell used
in creating the The Tattooist.
This was Schaeffer's only appearance
as a central figure in a Rockwell
illustration. Decker was Master
of the Grange in Arlington and
shows up in quite a few other Rockwell
illustrations.
The Post covers
his better known work but
he produced many more illustrations.
He completed covers for Literary
Digest, Life, and The
Country Gentleman. He
did ad work for companies
like AT&T, Campbell Soup,
Coca-Cola, and Ford Motor
Company but to name a few.
His other work included
movie promotional booklets,
Top Value Stamp catalogs,
murals, posters, sheet
music, six United States
postage stamps and an album
cover for Mike Bloomfield
and Al Kooper. He was a
busy man!
Norman Rockwell's art has a distinct
American flavor. His characters
are the people who live in everyone's
hometown. Rockwell died in 1978
at his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
On his easel was an unfinished
painting of a Christian missionary
trying to convert a Stockbridge
Indian chief.
Norman Rockwell once said, "No
picture ever really satisfies me.
If you become satisfied with your
work, you are through! I dream
that every picture I start is going
to be a wonderful one. In my mind
it has infinite possibilities,
but as I go on painting and am
forced to face realities the dream
begins to fade and I realize it
is going to be just another picture.
Then comes the time when I have
to call on all my character and
resolution to go ahead with the
painting. Finally, if all goes
well, toward the end a small part
of the hope for a good picture
returns and I finish it. But the
finished job is never up to the
dream at the start. If, in the
course of a year, I have done three
pictures of which I am at all proud,
I have had a pretty good year."
Rockwell worked from various photographs
while painting The Tattooist,
which was used as The Post cover
on the March 4, 1944 issue. In
fact, Rockwell used photographs
as an aid in doing most of his
paintings. For The Tattooist,
Rockwell borrowed a tattoo machine
from the Bowery tattooist Al Neville.
Tattoo shop signs seen here is
from the Rockwell collection. Rockwell
obviously consulted with Al Neville
along with former sailors to insure
accuracy in his painting of The
Tattooist.
Tattoo Archive © 2000
Norman Rockwell Update 2008!
An interesting sidelight to the painting of the Tattooist: The Tattoo Archive recently received an email from Ross Mosher who is the great, great nephew of Clarence Decker, the model for the Tattooist. The email read, “Clarence didn’t have a single tattoo in real life. Also, the last name on his arm is Betty, that’s because my great, great aunt Bell told Norman that if he put her name in the painting she wouldn’t speak to him again. So Norman crossed the L’s and added a Y."
See
a postcard, The Norman Rockwell Story, and
a poster by
Norman Rockwell
in our online store.
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