Norman Rockwell (1894 - 1978). Norman Percevel Rockwell was an American painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of the country's culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter, The Problem We All Live With, Saying Grace, and the Four Freedoms series. He is also noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America, during which he produced covers for their publication Boys' Life, calendars, and other illustrations. These works include popular images that reflect the Scout Oath and Scout Law such as The Scoutmaster, A Scout Is Reverent and A Guiding Hand. Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his surviving works are in public collections. Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate more than 40 books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and to paint portraits of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as those of foreign figures, including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. His portrait subjects also included Judy Garland. One of his last portraits was of Colonel Sanders in 1973. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts calendars between 1925 and 1976, were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the Four Seasons illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for 17 years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. He created artwork for advertisements for Coca-Cola, Jell-O, General Motors, Scott Tissue, and other companies. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters, sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals rounded out Rockwell's oeuvre as an illustrator. Rockwell's work was dismissed by serious art critics in his lifetime. Many of his works appear overly sweet in the opinion of modern critics, especially the Saturday Evening Post covers, which tend toward idealistic or sentimentalized portrayals of American life. This has led to the often deprecatory adjective Rockwellesque. Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a serious painter by some contemporary artists, who regard his work as bourgeois and kitsch. Writer Vladimir Nabokov stated that Rockwell's brilliant technique was put to banal use, and wrote in his novel Pnin: That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnaped by gypsies in babyhood. He is called an illustrator instead of an artist by some critics, a designation he did not mind, as that was what he called himself. In his later years, however, Rockwell began receiving more attention as a painter when he chose more serious subjects such as the series on racism for Look magazine. One example of this more serious work is The Problem We All Live With, which dealt with the issue of school racial integration. The painting depicts Ruby Bridges, flanked by white federal marshals, walking to school past a wall defaced by racist graffiti. This 1964 painting was displayed in the White House when Bridges met with President Barack Obama in 2011. Scout at Ship's Wheel, 1913 Norman Rockwell was born on February 3, 1894, in New York City, to Jarvis Waring Rockwell and Anne Mary Nancy Rockwell His father was a Presbyterian and his mother was an Episcopalian; two years after their engagement, he converted to the Episcopal faith. His earliest American ancestor was John Rockwell, from Somerset, England, who immigrated to colonial North America, probably in 1635, aboard the ship Hopewell and became one of the first settlers of Windsor, Connecticut. He had one brother, Jarvis Waring Rockwell Jr., older by a year and a half. Jarvis Waring Sr. was the manager of the New York office of a Philadelphia textile firm, George Wood, Sons & Company, where he spent his entire career. Rockwell transferred from high school to the Chase Art School at the age of 14. He then went on to the National Academy of Design and finally to the Art Students League. There, he was taught by Thomas Fogarty, George Bridgman, and Frank Vincent DuMond; his early works were produced for St. Nicholas Magazine, the Boy Scouts of America magazine Boys' Life, and other youth publications. As a student, Rockwell had some small jobs, including one as a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera. His first major artistic job came at age 18, illustrating Carl H. Claudy's book Tell Me Why: Stories about Mother Nature. After that, Rockwell was hired as a staff artist for Boys Life. In this role, he received 50 dollars' compensation each month for one completed cover and a set of story illustrations.