Merrie Christmas, 1929 Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) Oil on canvas Merrie Christmas is an embodiment of Norman Rockwell's imaginative journey with Victorian literature. The painting awakens the sentiments of the Christmas season for all who have read Charles Dickens' works. The portrayal of the coachman is based on Dickens' character of Tony Weller, father of Pickwick's manservant in Pickwick Papers. Weller is portly and robust and described as "uncommon fat." He wears top boots, a broad-brimmed hat and a tile-green shawl. "On the stage box he is king," writes Dickens. "Elsewhere he is a mere greenhorn."
In books read to him by his father, Rockwell grew up seeing the illustrations of H.K. Browne, known by his moniker, "Phiz." But Rockwell's full-color renderings bear little resemblance to Browne's linear style intended for engravings. Unlike many of Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers in which people are slightly caricatured, the flesh and blood realism of Merrie Christmas is so convincing that one feels Rockwell views Dickens' world as fact rather than fiction. Knowing Rockwell's empathy and predilection for the characters and imbedded messages in Dickens' works, we feel he must have yearned for a commission to illustrate his novels, but he never received one. Paintings such as this are the only tribute to the author to whom Rockwell credits his way of looking at life.
"This way of looking at things has stuck with me from those nights when my father would read Dickens to us in his even, colorless voice, the book laid flat before him to catch the full light of the lamp, the muffled noises of the city-the rumble of a cart, a shout-becoming the sounds of the London streets. . . . The variety, sadness, humor, happiness, treachery, the twists and turns of life; the sharp impressions of dirt, food, inns, horses, streets; and people-Micawber, Pickwick, Dombey (and son), Joe Gargery-in Dickens shocked and delighted me. 'So that,' I thought, 'is what the world is really like.' I began to look around me; I became insatiably curious."
Painting for The Saturday Evening Post cover, December 7, 1929 44.125 x 33.125 inches Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, Gift of the family of John W. Hanes, NRM.2000.3 ©1929 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN