Lesser-Known Facts About Norman Rockwell That Cast A Strange Light On His Iconic Paintings
Norman Rockwell is responsible for some of the most famous pieces of American art: think Rosie The Riveter and those fresh-faced kids depicted on old packs of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. But behind all that there was a sometimes funny, sometimes complicated man. He shared some of his story in his 1960 autobiography My Adventures as an Illustrator, and “adventures” really was the right word for it.
40. He believed his work was his identity
Rockwell wrote in his 1960 autobiography, “I put everything into my work. A lot of artists do that: their work is the only thing they’ve got that gives them an identity. I feel that I don’t have anything else, that I must keep working or I’ll go back to being pigeon-toed, narrow-shouldered — a lump.” It’s an interesting, slightly saddening look into his mind.
39. He was married three times
Rockwell had three wives throughout the course of his life. First was Irene O’Connor, who divorced him in 1921. Then came two women who were both called Mary — Mary Barstow, who died in 1959 while still married to Rockwell, and then Mary Punderson, who went by “Mollie”; she outlived him. Oh, and all three Mrs Rockwells were school teachers.
38. One of his works was given to the United Nations
Among Rockwell’s most famous works is the painting Golden Rule, which shows people from all over the world gathered underneath the phrase, “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You.” A mosaic of the painting was gifted to the U.N. by Nancy Reagan in 1985 and it’s still there at the organization’s New York headquarters. Rockwell himself wrote in his autobiography he believed the United Nations to be “our only hope.”
37. He had a favorite model
Rockwell used ordinary people to model for his work, and his favorite of all of these was a girl named Mary Whalen. He wrote in his autobiography, “She was the best model I ever had, could look sad one minute, jolly the next.” Whalen herself told magazine the Saturday Evening Post in 2013, “There was something about the connection with Norman. Maybe it just came at the right time in my life.”
