Daniel Boone, Pioneer Scout and The Road Led Through the Passes of the Hills, 1914 Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) Oil on canvas In 1912, after illustrating the new Boy Scout Hike Book for the Boy Scouts of America, Rockwell was offered a permanent job on their new monthly, Boys' Life. After just six months, he was promoted to art director at a salary of $50 per month, and was responsible for producing cover art, illustrating one story per issue, and hiring and editing all additional artwork for the magazine.
In 1914, Rockwell produced nineteen paintings and drawings to illustrate Everett T. Tomlinson's Scouting With Daniel Boone in eight installments of the magazine. In Tomlinson's story, set in 1773, Boone is hired by Virginia's Governor Dunmore to lead five families from Yadkin, North Carolina, through the wilderness hunting grounds of the Shawnee Indians to a settlement in Clinch, Virginia.
Daniel Boone, Pioneer Scout and The Road Led Through the Passes of the Hills illustrated the story's second and fourth installments. In the first, Daniel Boone, Pioneer Scout, Rockwell shows Boone as he is described by the text—"a tall man, quiet in his bearing, lean almost to thinness, in the prime of middle life and with every indication of self-control as well as of strength stamped upon his face and form." Later in the story, Boone escorts a band of twenty-seven men, hired to clear a road from the settlement in Clinch to a region in Kentucky. The Road Led Through the Passes of the Hills depicts Boone as sentry during their journey.
Both illustrations are painted en grisaille, French for "in gray." When illustrators knew their work would be printed in black and white, they often painted in tones of a single color, usually gray, brown, or blue, enabling them to better judge how the illustration would look in print. Rockwell used either brown (sometimes called sepia) or gray for his en grisaille paintings.
Odds & Ends: To encourage faithful readership of the eight monthly issues containing the Daniel Boone series, Boys' Life offered $300 in prizes in an essay contest. The writer of the best essay on "the qualities of Daniel Boone, which made him a good Scout and a valuable citizen, and why those qualities are important in life today," won a prize of $50. Fifty-six runners-up won prizes from $1 to $25.
Painting for Boys' Life story illustration, July 1914 20 x 12.5 inches Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, NRM.1989.1 Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing Company, Niles, IL.