Norman Rockwell's best-loved works, collected in a handsome clothbound volume   Norman Rockwell gave us a picture of America that was familiar―astonishingly so―and at the same time unique, because only he could bring it to life with such authority. Rockwell best expressed this vision of America in his justly famous cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post , painted between 1916 and 1963. All of his Post covers are reproduced in splendid full color in this oversized volume, with commentaries by Christopher Finch, the noted writer on art and popular culture. Christopher Finch  was born in Guernsey, Channel Islands, in 1939 and came to the United States in 1968 to join the curatorial staff of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His books include the best sellers  Norman Rockwell’s America, The Art of Walt Disney , and  Rainbow , a biography of Judy Garland, which was turned into a motion picture for NBC television. Excerpt from Norman Rockwell: 332 Magazine Covers Norman Rockwell Portrayed Americans as Americans Chose to See Themselves Norman Rockwell began his career as an illustrator in 1910, the year that Mark Twain died. He sold his first cover paintings when there were still horse-drawn cabs on the streets of many American cities, and he began his association with The Saturday Evening Post in 1916, the year in which Woodrow Wilson was elected to a second term in the White House and the year in which Chaplin's movie The Floorwalker broke box office records across the country. Young women were enjoying the comparative freedom of ankle-length skirts, and their beaux were serenading them with such immortal ditties as “The Sunshine of Your Smile” and “Yackie Hacki Wicki Wackie Woo.” In literature this was the age of Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, and O. Henry. Ernest Hemingway, still in his teens, was a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—soon to become a frequent contributor to the Post —was still at Princeton. The New York Armory show of 1913 had introduced the American public to recent trends in European painting, but traditional values still reigned supreme in the American art world. Only a handful of artists aspired to anything more novel than the mild postimpressionism of painters like John Sloan and Maurice Prendergast. The movies were becoming a potent force in popular entertainment, but few people took them seriously or thought they might one day take their place alongside established art forms. It was a world in transition, but the transition had not yet accelerated to the giddy speed it would achieve in the twenties. People could be thrilled by the exploits of pioneer aviators without being conscious of the impact that flying machines would have on modern warfare. It was possible to enjoy the conveniences provided by such relatively new inventions as the telephone, the phonograph, the vacuum cleaner, and the automobile without being too troubled by the notion that technology might someday soon threaten the established order of things. The illustrator and cover artist working in the mid-teens of the twentieth century was generally asked to embody established values. The latest model Hupmobile Runabout might well be the subject of a given picture—an advertisement, perhaps—but the people who were shown admiring or driving in the newfangled vehicle were presumed to espouse the same values as their parents and their grandparents. The set of the jaw, the glint in the eye had not changed much since the middle of the nineteenth century. The women wore their hair a little differently, perhaps, and men were doing without beards, but these are superficial differences. The fact is that the minds of the people who edited and bought magazines like Colliers, Country Gentleman, Literary Digest, and The Saturday Evening Post had been formed, to a large extent, in the Victorian era. Norman Rockwell himself, born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, had a classic late Victorian upbringing. He spent his childhood in a solidly middle-class, God-fearing household in which it was the custom for his father to read the works of Dickens out loud to the entire family. Thus Rockwell had little difficulty in adapting to the conventions that were current in the field of magazine illustration at the outset of his career. Although a New Yorker, he was especially drawn to rural subject matter (he is on record as saying that he felt more at home in the country). This reinforced his affection for traditional idioms, since it focused his attention on the most conservative elements of the population, those who were least susceptible to change of any kind. In short, Rockwell began his career right in the mainstream of the illustrators of his day, sharing the assumptions and concerns of his contemporaries and of the editors who employed him. His work is remarkable because he sustained through half a century the values that he espoused in those early days when the worl