Norman Rockwell valuation
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.
What a work by Norman Rockwell is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 3 February 1894, New York City
- Died
- 8 November 1978, Stockbridge
- Movements
- American Realism, French Realism
More on Wikipedia.
Signed lithographs and collotypes from the 1970s
In the last years of his life Rockwell signed limited editions of prints after his best-known pictures: lithographs published by Eleanor Ettinger from the mid-1970s, typically in editions of two hundred with a smaller number of artist's proofs, and collotypes printed in the same decade. A pencil signature on one of these is his own, and they are the most collected of the prints.
Later editions are a different matter. Prints issued after his death in 1978 carry a printed or embossed signature rather than a pencil one, and the plates, figurines and licensed reproductions made in very large numbers are collectibles rather than prints. The publisher's details in the margin, the edition number and the paper usually show which a sheet is.
Harlem, New Rochelle and the Four Freedoms
Rockwell was born in Harlem and left high school at fourteen for the Chase Art School, later Parsons School of Design. When the family moved to New Rochelle he shared a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, who worked for The Saturday Evening Post, and with his help Boy with Baby Carriage ran on the cover on 20 May 1916, the first of eight Post covers within the year. The Four Freedoms, painted in 1943 after a speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, took him seven months, and the Pennell family of Brunswick, Maine, sat for Freedom from Want.
His work for the Boy Scouts of America ran for 64 years, with covers for Boys' Life and an annual calendar from 1925 to 1976, and his Four Seasons calendars for Brown & Bigelow began in 1947. He illustrated more than 40 books, among them Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, painted Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and made illustrations for film posters including The Magnificent Ambersons and Stagecoach. In the late 1940s he spent his winters as artist-in-residence at Otis College of Art and Design. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge holds more than 700 of his paintings, drawings and studies, and in 2008 he was named the state artist of Massachusetts.
Best auction results
- Saying Grace $46m
- Oil on canvas, 1951 · New York · December 2013
- Publicly reported
- Including fees. The artist's auction record.
- Breaking Home Ties $15.4m
- Oil on canvas, 1954 · New York · November 2006
- Publicly reported
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
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.
