Ye olde Arlington, where I live in southwestern Vermont, has, for a town of fewer than 2,500 people, abundant claims to fame. Many of the Green Mountain Boys lived here. Arlington was for a time capital of the Vermont Republic, taking it international, though with a population then in the hundreds, it must have been the world’s smallest. Robert Frost knew Arlington well, coaxed to live in neighboring Shaftsbury by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Arlington’s culture queen, a Pulitzer-finalist writer, the pioneer in the Montessori method in America, and an assiduous networker. And then there’s Norman Rockwell (1894–1978).
Rockwell, his wife, Mary, and their three sons lived in Arlington from 1938 to 1953, when they moved to Stockbridge in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Stockbridge got the museum — the Norman Rockwell Museum, dedicated to American illustration and owning a trove of his work — but Rockwell’s most creative years and his best models were here. I visit the Stockbridge museum once or twice a year because its exhibitions are always top-notch, and this year’s Norman Rockwell: Home for the Holidays is a sentimental favorite. Rockwell’s many things, but I think his calling card is gratitude’s premier marketeer and image maker. In Home for the Holidays, Thanksgiving stars but also Christmas, family reunions, country life, and tried-and-true values. Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings from 1943, which led to illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post and millions of war bond drive posters, are always on display in the museum and still pack a punch.
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