Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell was an American painter and illustrator best known for the cover paintings he produced for The Saturday Evening Post over a span of nearly five decades, images that came to represent a particular vision of twentieth-century American life. He was born Norman Perceval Rockwell in New York City in 1894 and was raised in Manhattan and the suburb of Mamaroneck.

Rockwell decided as a teenager to become an illustrator and left high school to study full time, attending the Chase Art School, the National Academy of Design, and then the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under Thomas Fogarty and George Bridgman in the early 1910s.

His first Saturday Evening Post cover appeared in May 1916, when he was twenty-two, and over the next forty-seven years he produced 322 covers for the magazine. During the Second World War he painted the Four Freedoms, a series inspired by a 1941 speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, which toured the country to help raise funds for war bonds.

From 1963 onward Rockwell worked for Look magazine, where he addressed civil rights, the space program, and the Peace Corps in paintings such as The Problem We All Live With. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, a year before his death, and the museum dedicated to his work opened in his adopted town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

The name Norman comes from an Old French and Germanic source meaning "north man," originally describing Scandinavian settlers in northern France. Brought to England by the Normans after 1066, it survived as a surname through the Middle Ages and was revived as a given name in nineteenth-century Britain and North America.