Norman Rockwell completed 321 covers for the Saturday Evening Post. At this time, the Saturday Evening Post was what everyone was looking at. The fact that so many of his illustrations made it onto the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post was huge. Norman Rockwell liked depicting American life. He depicted America as very idealistic and said that life often wasn’t ideal, but he thought it ought to be and so that is what he would illustrate. Rockwell did four paintings called the Four Freedoms which were: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. These paintings were inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. People were very moved by these pieces because it was a period in time when people were advocating for their own rights. The Four Freedoms generated tons of money for the war from people going to see it. There is a print of the Four Freedoms here at Indiana Wesleyan in the Jackson Library even, which says a lot about how Norman Rockwell impacted Americans with his idealistic American paintings. Basically, he painted America and things in America as he thought they should be and people resonated with that.
Norman Rockwell has impacted me through the work that he did just as every other illustrator I have studied so far has. The message that came through his paintings was that “this is what America should look like.” I think that the way we all think of America now has a very great deal to do with Rockwell’s presentation of it. America is so romanticized in his paintings and that is the case with the way people often think of America today. Seeing how Rockwell was able to encourage this way of thinking of something, makes me feel encouraged that if I have the right outlet as he had with the Saturday Evening Post, then I could even change the way people think of something.