When creating his iconic paintings, Norman Rockwell went all out with one-hundred-percent focus. There was the communication with book and magazine editors who fed him ideas. Then, Norman would painstakingly create layouts with strong design elements. Since he demanded of himself that his paintings appear genuine, he searched for models until he found the one that fit the bill, as a Steven Spielberg would do for an actor. He refused to settle for mediocrity. Sometimes he tried several. Once he had a model in the studio, he would direct them to get the poses and expressions he must have. Sometimes he’d bring back a model several times.

In addition to all this, he researched his subjects carefully, another reason why his paintings appear authentic. The model who posed for more Boy Scout calendar paintings than anyone, Buddy Edgerton, described to me during in an interview how Norman went to great pains. Buddy and his family lived next door to Norman in West Arlington, Vermont for ten years. He appears as the bigger boy in the 1945 painting, A Guiding Hand with Norman’s son Tom.

Norman once traveled from Vermont to a Chicago department store to study the setting he would use for his Christmas 1947 painting, Tired Salesgirl. While illustrating Tom Sawyer, he traveled to Hannibal, Missouri to sit in the same cave Twain used as a setting. While working on First Sign of Spring, a Post Cover in March 1947, Norman drove a half hour each way just to get a crocus from a florist. Wouldn’t it have been easy enough to paint this small detail from a book?

As he painted model Mary Whalen for his masterpiece The Shiner, a Saturday Evening Post cover in 1953, Norman realized he could not create a black eye from his imagination. He went to the extent of advertising in the Bennington Banner newspaper. A father whose son had two fresh black eyes brought the boy to the studio from Springfield, Massachusetts. “Norman said a black eye isn’t just black,” explained Buddy with a chuckle. Black eyes also have blue and red highlights. “Why was he so fussy? He was his worst critic, actually. He was so great because of his talent and attention to detail. If he didn’t get it just perfect, it would wear on him…It probably was a good thing.”

Buddy told me that Norman could have produced many more pictures if he took his business a little less seriously. But he contemplated for a moment and said, “But he wouldn’t have been so great!”

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