America's Most Popular Artist

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THIS year marks the centenary of the birth of American's most popular artist. But you should not look forward to any large-scale retrospective of his work. indeed, you need not anticipate any public celebration at all on his account -- except in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he lived for the last twenty-five years of his life(*), and where a museum devoted entirely to his work opened in mid-1993. popular as he is, his paintings are rarely on show in any of America's major art galleries. Which is not to say that they do not feature in their collections. They do, in fact, in quite a few -- including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. it's just that the museums and galleries that own them are not confident about having them on permanent display. We are talking, of course, about Norman Rockwell. So what is going on?

Norman Percevel Rockwell was born on Manhattan's Upper West Side on 3 February 1894, and spent most of his formative years there -- an interesting beginning, perhaps, for someone who subsequently came to be identified so closely with small town America. His father, Thomas Waring Rockwell, the manager of the New York office of a textile business, was much concerned with his own and his family's cultural improvement -- he was given to reading aloud at meals, and in his spare time used, significantly perhaps, to copy illustrations from magazines. Nancy Hill Rockwell, Norman's mother, was the daughter of Thomas Hill, an English painter who settled in the States in the late 1860s, after the Civil War. His style was inherited, or shared, in at least one respect by his grandson: 'he painted in great detail', Rockwell was to say of him.

With such a background, …