Norman Rockwell & Peers: Illustrating Childhood

Before televisions, computers, and high-speed internet, everyday Americans engaged with image-based storytelling through illustration. Illustration is art created to be reproduced for books, magazines, periodicals, advertisements, and other printed media. Designed covers—based on finished paintings—by artists like Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) regularly reached thousands of homes via mass-produced publications such as “The Saturday Evening Post.” Celebrating the charming, wholesome, and seemingly commonplace, Rockwell enjoyed a successful career, which unfolded against a string of era-defining crises and revolutions, including two World Wars, the Great Depression, struggles over Civil Rights, and space exploration. Through illustration, Rockwell and his peers chronicled the transformation and challenging of ideals in the 20th-century, sometimes using childhood to explore complex subject matter. By tapping into American adults’ nostalgia and their associations of childhood with innocence, these artists made subjects from consumer goods to wartime politics more appealing. Through advertisements and calendar illustrations, magazine covers, and story artwork, ‘Norman Rockwell & Peers: Illustrating Childhood’ regards childhood as an expressive and revealing lens to view an evolving and often complex American society.