Norman Rockwell’s Spirit of the Holidays: Festive Show of Beloved Artist

I hadn’t been to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., for a couple of years. Its anchor is Rockwell (1894–1978), the king of American illustration, and it owns about a thousand of his paintings and drawings, but it does shows and scholarship on the broad field of illustration in our country from the time of Winslow Homer to today. It’s a lovely museum and infinitely pleasant to be there.

Norman Rockwell’s Spirit of the Holidays is the charming, festive exhibition on view. Rockwell was the star artist at the Saturday Evening Post, producing over 300 covers and hundreds of inside images from 1916 to 1963, as well as an artist for the Boy Scouts and Hallmark. At the Post, Rockwell often got the front-cover assignment for Christmas. Over the years, he fashioned homecoming veterans, cheery families, and Santa Claus, usually in modest rural New England homes and often set in snowy landscapes. The museum gathers the best of these as well as some of Rockwell’s Thanksgiving pictures, since the exhibition opened this fall.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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I hadn’t been to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., for a couple of years. Its anchor is Rockwell (1894–1978), the king of American illustration, and it owns about a thousand of his paintings and drawings, but it does shows and scholarship on the broad field of illustration in our country from the time of Winslow Homer to today. It’s a lovely museum and infinitely pleasant to be there.

Norman Rockwell’s Spirit of the Holidays is the charming, festive exhibition on view. Rockwell was the star artist at the Saturday Evening Post, producing over 300 covers and hundreds of inside images from 1916 to 1963, as well as an artist for the Boy Scouts and Hallmark. At the Post, Rockwell often got the front-cover assignment for Christmas. Over the years, he fashioned homecoming veterans, cheery families, and Santa Claus, usually in modest rural New England homes and often set in snowy landscapes. The museum gathers the best of these as well as some of Rockwell’s Thanksgiving pictures, since the exhibition opened this fall.