I completely forgot about Norman Rockwell. I’m even subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, and it was this artist who actually sparked my venture to the Library of Congress for archives of this magazine. That’s how magazine cover illustrations were made— the artist painted a large-scale oil painting on a topical subject, then it was photographed and placed on the cover, and he would go on to make the next one. And look at the attention to detail! It’s certainly not routine. That era has passed; now the artists are different, and their work looks quite different too. Each painting was accompanied either by a story or served as a form of self-expression by the artist, boosting circulation. For example, the girl with the black eye was the model Mary Whalen Leonard, the principal’s door and the setting were from a school in Cambridge, New York. The artist even managed to physically transport the door from the school to his studio. Some paintings were illustrations for stories in the magazine. But I think all his paintings tell a story, whether fictional or real, and that’s what makes them interesting to look at.
In 1943, a fire in his studio destroyed all of the work stored there, as well as costumes and props that he had collected over the years. Also destroyed was his collection of pipes. Rockwell said that he may have dropped an ash from his pipe onto a chair that sat under the light switch when he turned off the lights to leave the studio that night. Friends who visited him at the studio said that he had a habit of lighting his pipe and then tossing the match into a large iron pot in which he stored his turpentine rags.
Even before the fire, Rockwell discarded some of his own original oils and sketches. He would send a painting to the Saturday Evening Post to be used for a cover and, when it was returned, he would rip the canvas off the frame, toss it away and stretch a new piece of canvas onto the frame for the next painting.
When a fan wrote to him, asking if she could buy some of his original work, he called her “the crazy woman from Chicago” and charged her $100 a piece for seven canvasses. The “crazy woman’s” family sold the paintings in the 1990s for $17 million
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Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 