Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.
—Norman Rockwell
For over 60 years, Norman Rockwell painted this country and its people with unabashed frankness and poignancy, giving us a living chronicle of ourselves, our dreams, and our aspirations. The body of his work is a pictorial legacy of the way we are and the way we wish to be, and constitutes a truly immeasurable contribution to American art.
Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing over 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate over 40 books.
Rockwell's work was dismissed by serious art critics in his lifetime. Many of his works appear overly sweet in modern critics' eyes, especially the Saturday Evening Post covers, which tend toward idealistic or sentimentalized portrayals of American life – this has led to the often-deprecatory adjective "Rockwellesque". Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a "serious painter" by some contemporary artists, who often regard his work as bourgeois and kitsch. He is called an "illustrator" instead of an artist by some critics, a designation he did not mind, as it was what he called himself.
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