Norman Percevel Rockwell

Norman Percevel Rockwell died in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on November 8, 1978. He was eighty-four. Born in New York City on February 3, 1894, he painted Saturday Evening Post covers that a country used as a mirror — sometimes kindly, later more honestly, as in the paintings of Ruby Bridges and the other Goldsboro children. Stockbridge was the last studio. The museum there still hangs the work that critics once dismissed as illustration and neighbors recognized as a record of how they wished to be seen, and then of how they actually were. The town green is still the one in the pictures.