Norman Rockwell
Painted 323 Saturday Evening Post covers, and then painted a girl walking into a desegregated school.
Norman Rockwell was born in New York in 1894 and sold his first cover to The Saturday Evening Post at twenty-two, going on to produce three hundred and twenty-three of them over forty-seven years. The reputation as a sentimentalist obscures both the technical seriousness of the work — every picture built from staged photographs, models and full-scale studies — and the later career, when he left the Post for Look and painted The Problem We All Live With, showing Ruby Bridges escorted into a New Orleans school by federal marshals. He died in 1978.
This is an American market with a very wide range. Original oil studies and finished cover paintings are scarce and sit at the top; the finished works were commissioned illustrations, so provenance frequently runs through publishers and advertising clients. Charcoal and oil studies are more available. The market's practical difficulty is volume of reproduction: collotypes, offset prints, plates, figurines and licensed product were issued in enormous numbers over decades and are routinely offered as limited editions. The Norman Rockwell Museum holds the archive.
If you own a work by Norman Rockwell
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.