Rockwell, The Impressionist

I was completely surprised to find that Rockwell’s oil paintings ( see post below regarding the Norman Rockwell retrospective exhibit I attended) were not the smooth textured, tightly painted works I expected from the miniaturized reproductions I have seen.

In fact, Rockwell’s canvases are quite large: on average around 50” x 40” . This allowed him to fit in a great deal of detail as well as to paint far more broadly; sometimes almost in an Impressionist manner, than one would be led to believe in the apparent “tightness” of the reduced images we do get to see.

For instance see the detail area of the white cloth on the pants of Abe Lincoln in his painting “ Lincoln for the Defense”. In the painting it all reads as rumpled white cloth but close up it is just dabs of colour.

Note also a detail of the sleeve. Neither the reduced image of the entire painting nor the close up detail shows it for what I saw in person. The ruddy shadowed areas in the folds on the sleeve in life are very hard edged, dry brushed streaks of bright burgundy paint. There is no effort at all to soften and blend them into the folds. In fact, they look a little stark in real life. Rockwell clearly painted with the foreknowledge that his work was going to be shown in reduced format and he understood how his strokes would appear when presented that way.

In many paintings I  noted faces that were created with streaks of unblended colour that look absolutely tight and precise when the image is reduced

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