Who Was Norman Rockwell?

By (author) Fabiny Sarah; By (author) Who HQ; Illustrated by Copeland Gregory
Short description/annotation
Brush up your knowledge on popular American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell with this exciting Who Was? title.
Description
Norman Rockwell often painted what he saw around him in nostalgic and humorous ways. After hearing President Franklin Roosevelt’s address to Congress in 1943, he was inspired to create paintings that described the principles for universal rights: four paintings that portray iconic images of the American experience. Over the course of his lifetime, he painted 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Of his work, he has said: “Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfect place I thought it to be, I consciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be, and so painted only the ideal aspects of it.”
Biographical note
Sarah Fabiny has written several Who Was? titles, including biographies of Beatrix Potter, Frida Kahlo, Rachel Carson, and Gloria Steinem.
Promotional headline
Brush up your knowledge on popular American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell with this exciting Who Was? title.
Excerpt
Who Was Norman Rockwell?
 
 
In June 1993, almost fifteen years after Norman Rockwell died, the Norman Rockwell Museum opened in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Stockbridge is the town where Norman had lived and worked for the last twenty-five years of his life. And this new museum had been built to hold the largest collection of Norman Rockwell art in the world.
 
The opening of the museum was a special occasion. Many people who had posed for Norman were there. His sons planted a tree in his memory. Children played and ran around the beautiful lawn and museum grounds. The crowd sang “America the Beautiful.” The day was like a scene from one of Norman’s own paintings! According to an article in the New York Times, “The sun was shining brightly, of course. The sky was blue and the weather was temperate. There were Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts . . . antique fire engines and a four-clown band. It was an all-American Day. A Norman Rockwell day.”
 
Norman Rockwell painted scenes that captured the everyday experiences of Americans. His paintings made people feel special. They also made people think, laugh, and sometimes cry. They reflected the lives of ordinary Americans. And they often seemed to give people hope.
 
  
Chapter 1: A Boy with a Pencil
 
  
Norman Perceval Rockwell was born on February 3, 1894, in New York City. He was the second child of Nancy Hill Rockwell and Jarvis Waring Rockwell. Their firstborn son, Norman’s brother, Jarvis, was a year and a half older than Norman.
 
When Norman was born, the Rockwells lived on the fifth floor of a brownstone building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. At the time, the neighborhood was a bit rough and tough. There were a few street gangs who liked to start fights. Norman and his older brother did their best to stay out of trouble.
 
The kids in the Rockwells’ neighborhood spent a lot of time playing games, like tag and touch football. Jarvis was athletic and good at sports. 
 
He got picked for teams all the time. But Norman was skinny and clumsy, and he hardly ever got chosen to be on a team. Fortunately, Norman was good at something else: He could draw.
 
The Rockwell home was a quiet, serious place. Some nights Norman’s father would sketch copies of pictures from magazines. Norman would sit and watch him. He would try to copy what his father drew. Norman’s father also read aloud to the family at night. As his father read, Norman would draw the characters in the story. He would imagine what they looked like and how they acted. Some of the books he read were by the famous British author Charl