Some further background on Norman Rockwell from my own experiences.  I spent the past two and a half years in Western Massachusetts where Norman Rockwell worked for some time before moving to Southern Vermont.  His major subjects are what you might call middle class small town Americans.  The majority of the places he depicts in his paintings are actually real places; I have been to a good many of them simply by living in the area.  Although Norman Rockwell unlike Bryan Larsen is not what one would call a romantic realist.  Rockwell preferred to show Americans of his time period as he saw them: hardworking, dedicated, patriotic, perhaps sometimes a busybody but overall good down to earth people.  In short perhaps you can say that Norman Rockwell created the image of America: apple pies, baseball and small town main streets.

In my time spent in New England I was privy to see and meet Jarvis Rockwell, the son of the late Norman Rockwell, at the showing of his pyramid of toy action figures.  Like most of the artists of Western Massachusetts, Jarvis, is a post-modernist.  It is sad to see that any talent that may have been relayed from father to son has gone to waste.  Today, Jarvis amongst other burnt out old hippies hide in their art enclaves in the mountains of Western Massachusetts visited only by the most avant-garde of New York City’s art people.  They hide in the mountains showing each other their latest abominations, where once a great painter lived.

Truly,

 
Eric J. Tower

I find it interesting that many contemporary painters might create exactly the same picture, and intend it to mean the opposite: make it into a humorous or malicious sneer at the gentleman depicted. In fact, so soaked am I in our cultural atmosphere that that was my first reaction to this painting.