Fantastical Faces of
Peter Rockwell:
A Sculptor’s Retrospective

As a young man, Peter Rockwell had no interest in pursuing a career as an artist, and intentionally avoided the arts because they were "too much in the family." A student of English literature at Haverford College, he eventually enrolled in a sculpture class at the prompting of his mother, Mary Rockwell, and "fell head-over-heels in love with it."

Today a noted sculptor and art historian, Peter Rockwell is the youngest son of legendary American illustrator, Norman Rockwell. His vibrant, animated works, inspired by circus acrobats, animals in motion, gargoyles, and monsters are featured in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, The Bridgeport Museum of American Art, and the Norman Rockwell Museum, which holds the largest compilation of his art. A leading scholar of the history of stone carving, he has documented his knowledge in The Art of Stoneworking, his highly-regarded reference guide. An outstanding collection of the artist’s bronze, marble, and limestone sculptures will be on view on our pastoral landscape in celebration of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s fortieth anniversary.

Norman Rockwell:
Behind the Camera

Photography has been a benevolent tool for artists from Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas to David Hockney. And to illustrators, always on the lookout for better ways to meet deadlines, the camera has long been a natural ally. But the thousands of photographs Norman Rockwell created as studies for his iconic images are a case apart. A natural storyteller, Rockwell envisioned his narrative scenarios down to the smallest detail. Yet at the easel he was an absolute literalist who rarely painted directly from his imagination.

Instead, he first brought his ideas to life in studio sessions, staging photographs that are fully realized works of art in their own right. Selecting props and locations, choosing and directing his models, he carefully orchestrated each element of his design for the camera before beginning to paint. Meticulously composed and richly detailed, Norman Rockwell’s study photographs mirror his masterworks in a tangible parallel universe. Photography opened a door to the keenly observed authenticity that defines Norman Rockwell’s art. And for us today it is a revelation to discover that so many of his most memorable characters were, in fact, real people.

Curator and author Ron Schick is the first to undertake a frame-by-frame study of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s newly digitized photography archive, the product of a just-completed two-year “Save America’s Treasures” project that has preserved the artist’s archive of almost 20,000 negatives and made accessible the full range of the artist’s photography. His forthcoming book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, will be published by Little, Brown and Company in 2009.