Artist Facing Blank Canvas (The Deadline), 1938 Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) Oil on canvas As an illustrator, Norman Rockwell struggled with deadlines his entire life. He said of this painting, "Meeting deadlines and thinking up ideas are the scourges of an illustrator's life. This is not a caricature of myself; I really look like this." Commissions for advertising, story, and book illustrations came with suggestions or even imperatives for the subject of a painting, but cover art for a publication such as The Saturday Evening Post required Rockwell to develop his own original and, preferably, new ideas. He had never used the theme of an artist facing a deadline before, but in 1938, after returning from an extended family vacation in England, it became useful.
Though he often posed for characters in his own paintings when "extras" were needed for a scene with a lot of people, Rockwell did few formal self-portraits or paintings in which he was the sole character. Artist Facing Blank Canvas is one. In it Rockwell is surrounded by his references. Museum reproductions, art history books, artists' monographs, illustrators' annuals, and books and tear sheets on such subjects as birds, animals, and trees comprised his library. Photos taken for one painting were saved in files and binders, and sometimes were used a second or third time. Sketches strewn about represent rejected ideas for this Post cover. These elements accurately portray Rockwell. Others don't ring true. Rockwell did have a horseshoe, but it hung on his studio wall-not from his easel, where it would have been in the way of his work. Orienting it opposite the usual upside-down placement believed to bring good luck may symbolize the bad luck he has encountered; his August due date had long passed. Rockwell rarely began a painting at the oil-on-canvas stage. By the time a canvas was primed and on his easel, he had completed a fully detailed drawing, the same size as the canvas, ready to have its basic composition traced to the final support. His palette table, which was always to the left of his easel, has been replaced by a hand-held palette on the floor to his left, perhaps as a compositional counterbalance to the sketches on the floor to his right. Rockwell's pipe, included in all his self-portraits because he thought of himself as "an inveterate pipe smoker," is in his pants pocket because he thought it would be more prominent. And, finally, Rockwell's costume is fictional, created with the idea of brightening things up.
Painting for The Saturday Evening Post cover, October 8, 1938 38.5 x 30.5 inches Inscribed "To my good friends Jorj and Ben Harris" Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust, 1973.4 ©1938 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN