Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts

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This was published 9 years ago

Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts

Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is recognisable in paintings in the town's Norman Rockwell Museum as the comfortable setting for the lives Rockwell evoked in his art.

By Michael Gebicki
American flags fly on the quaint shops along Main Street of Stockbridge.

American flags fly on the quaint shops along Main Street of Stockbridge.Credit: Getty Images

In the bosomy green Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, the town of Stockbridge is an instant pick-me-up, like snorting air freshener. Its streets are named Elm, Laurel, Maple, Pine and Main, and the Stars and Stripes flutters bravely from its lawns, which are clipped just so. At the heart of it is the venerable Red Lion Inn, where one may take afternoon tea on the broad verandah while surveying the goings-on in the street below. Its shops are devoted almost exclusively to Sunday afternoon browsers - expensive crafts, antiques, restaurants. Etched into the town's horse trough is the adage "Utility is preferable to grandeur", which is something you might like to ponder next time you're watering your steed. Polite, well-bred and exceedingly well-off, it seems the very incarnation of Yankee New England. It's an America that I recognise from the paintings of Norman Rockwell, and it is entirely fitting that Stockbridge hosts the Norman Rockwell Museum, the largest collection of his oeuvre, in leafy surrounds complete with his relocated studio.

Rockwell was born in New York City in 1894 but he drew much of his inspiration from small-town New England. A prodigious illustrator of the photorealist genre, Rockwell's specialty was snapshot depictions of next-door America, a talent that made him the preferred artist of The Saturday Evening Post, for which he painted 321 covers over 47 years. The electrical linesman hard at work up a pole, the wise coach offering advice to the college football player, grace before meals, Thanksgiving turkey – Rockwell's work celebrates the touchstones of American life. His 1943 depiction of Rosie the Riveter, posed in front of a fluttering Stars and Stripes, one foot treading on Hitler's Mein Kampf, conferred hero status on women factory workers building aircraft for the fight against Nazi Germany. In 2002 Rockwell's original painting of Rosie sold at auction for close to $5 million.

He was the anaesthetist rather than the social surgeon, glorying in a star-spangled view of America in which men are clear-eyed and square of jaw, children are lavishly freckled and women are aproned and dewy-eyed. His illustrations - the runaway boy sitting beside the cop at the soda fountain, the chastened husband sporting a black eye with his wife in the marriage counsellor's waiting room – took him into the heart of an America stuck on common heroes. Rockwell moved to Stockbridge in 1953 and spent the last 25 years of his life there, and Rockwell and Stockbridge were made for one another. So much so that his painting of Stockbridge's Main Street under a winter dusting of snow is recreated each year in December. As well as a substantial chunk of Rockwell's work, the museum shows another side of the man – the prolific worker with a self-deprecating sense of humour who could turn even the incineration of his studio into a cartoon. In another, Triple Self-Portrait, an ageing Rockwell considers himself in a mirror, while painting a much younger version on the canvas. Who could not like such a man?

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