Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell (1894 –1978) was a popular American painter and illustrator best known for his depictions of everyday life and positive American values. His first cover for the Saturday Evening Post appeared in 1916, and over three hundred followed during the next forty-seven years. In the early 1960s, he began working for Look magazine, where he turned to more political concerns such as civil rights and space exploration. In 1977, Rockwell received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal. The 1943 painting shown on the following page appeared in the Saturday Evening Post as part of Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series. These illustrations depict the “four essential human freedoms” delineated in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Message to Congress on January 6, 1941: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The Thanksgiving scene shows Rockwell’s interpretation of freedom from want, which, in Roosevelt’s words, “means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.” This painting appeared in the magazine with the headline, “Ours . . . to fight for.”