On the Satevepost's cover for May 29, one William B. Sommerville of Lawrence, Kans. saw something that rang faint bells in his memory. What he saw was a lordly, rotund lady riveter named Rosie (see cut), ankles crossed, overalled knees relaxed, looking royally satisfied with herself and her bulging cheekful of ham sandwich. Mr. Sommerville took Rosie the Riveter to the public library. Memory's bells became a carillon when he turned up a reproduction of Michelangelo's Isaiah (see cut). Mr. Sommerville sent his find to the Kansas City Star, which made good-humored use of it.
Rosie's creator was probably the best-loved U.S. artist alive—lean, likable Norman Rockwell, painter of the nationally distributed Four Freedoms posters. After the Rosie episode, he got a good deal of personal mail at his home in Arlington, Vt. One of the letters felt that Michelangelo must be about as restful in his grave as a drill in a cavity. The others were pleased. Mr. Rockwell himself, quite untroubled, told questioners that the modeling was of course deliberate, that he thought it would be "fun." He added, "At first I was going to make it entirely like Michelangelo, but his color was not good for a magazine."
Evergreen. In his early teens, 49-year-old Norman Rockwell, son of a New York agent for a Philadelphia cotton-goods firm, studied for a year and a half under Anatomist George Bridgman and the late Thomas Fogarty at Manhattan's Art Students' League. He worked a few months more at the National Academy of Design. That is all the formal art training he ever had—all, for his special abilities and purposes, that he ever needed. At 17 he was doing illustrations for St. Nicholas, Boys' Life, Youth's Companion. In 1916, just as he reached his majority, he also reached the cover of the Satevepost,* which has since kept his bank account and his popular standing green. For the Post he has done, to date, either 222 or 223 covers, he is not quite sure which. During World War I he had a Navy interlude as "third-class painter and varnisher."
Rockwell's popularity is not hard to fathom. His pictures are never self-sufficient as painting; they nearly always tell a story. Moreover, he constantly achieves, with no sacrifice of conscientious sincerity, that compromise between a love of realism and the tendency to idealize which is one of the most deeply grained characteristics of the American people. He has a born eye for the face which combines individualism with typicality, a hairline intuition for the gentling (some would say falsification) which will make it most broadly appealing, a quick and simple love—richly shared with his audience—for home and homeliness in endless friendly details of flesh and costume. He is a master of nostalgias.
Rockwell would probably be incapable of portraying a really evil human being, or even a really complex one—perhaps even a really real one. Though he paints and composes exceedingly well, it is questionable whether any of his work could be seriously described as art. Even the Four Freedoms posters fall short of artistic maturity through their very virtue as posters: they hit hardest at first sight. But, as a loving image of what a great people likes to imagine itself to be, Rockwell's work has dignity, warmth, value.