N08802

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Lot 99
  • 99

Norman Rockwell 1894 - 1978

Estimate
1,200,000 - 1,800,000 USD
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Description

  • Norman Rockwell
  • Couple with Milkman
  • signed Norman Rockwell, l.r.
  • oil on canvas
  • 27 by 30 in.
  • (68.6 by 76.2 cm)
  • Painted in 1935.

Provenance

The artist
Private Collection
American Illustrator's Gallery, New York
Private Collection

Literature

Saturday Evening Post, March 9, 1935, illustrated in color on the cover
Laurie Norton Moffatt, Norman Rockwell: A Definitive Catalogue, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1956, vol. I, no. C346, p. 129, illustrated
Thomas S. Buechner, Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator, New York, 1970, no. 295, illustrated
Christopher Finch, Norman Rockwell's America, New York, 1975, no. 91, illustrated p. 85 (as The Partygoers)
Dr. Donald R. Stoltz and Marshall L. Stoltz, Norman Rockwell and The Saturday Evening Post: The Middle Years, New York, 1976, p. 97, illustrated in color p. 98 (as Meeting the Milkman)
Mary Moline, Norman Rockwell Encyclopedia, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1979, fig. I-266, p. 58, illustrated (as The Partygoers)
Jan Cohn, Covers of the Saturday Evening Post: Seventy Years of Outstanding Illustration from America's Favorite Magazine, New York, 1998, p. 156, illustrated in color
Judy Goffman Cutler and Laurence S. Cutler, Maxfield Parrish and the American Imagist, Edison, New Jersey, 2004, p. 414
Judy Goffman Cutler and Laurence S. Cutler, Norman Rockwell's America in England, Newport, Rhode Island, 2010, pp. 76-77

Catalogue Note

In 1916, at the age of 22, Norman Rockwell painted his first cover for the Saturday Evening Post, the country's most popular magazine and the first to reach the threshold of a million in circulation.  Over the next 47 years, Rockwell's partnership with the Post would result in 321 unique covers for the publication.  These images not only became synonymous with the magazine itself, but simultaneously defined an American era.

Rockwell's first covers in the 1910's and 1920's almost exclusively featured children, a subject which defined his early career and spread his popularity throughout America.   But in the 1930s his covers diverged slightly to focus on young adults in humorous and sentimental situations. This shift was possibly linked to changes in the artist's personal life; in 1930 Rockwell was divorced from his first wife, Irene O'Connor, and married to Mary Barstow, a young schoolteacher, by the end of the year. The newly married couple quickly settled their family in New Rochelle, New York, and welcomed three sons born in the early 1930's.

Couple with Milkman reflects the central role young romance had come to play in Rockwell's personal life, as well as on his Post covers.  The composition further conveys the inherent humor the artist found in all walks of daily American life.  Of this image Christopher Finch writes, "[This] 1935 cover brings us right back in the twentieth century. A pair of partygoers returning home has stopped to consult a milkman's watch. The couple appears to be a little surprised to discover how late it is, but they are hardly overcome by shock. This is, after all, the thirties. Not the thirties of the Depression, but the thirties which produced the compensating myth of Hollywood and the Great White Way. This is the thirties of Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Jean Harlow; of The Philadelphia Story and Flying Down to Rio; of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Irving Berlin, and Noel Coward. Any self-respecting pair of partygoers returning home would stop a milkman to ask the time; it would be the final seal of approval on a successful date" (Norman Rockwell's America, New York, 1975, p. 86).