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Norman Rockwell
Freedom of Speech, 1942
Illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, February 20, 1943
Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech is arguably among the most famous works of American art. Popular from its first publication in The Saturday Evening Post, it expresses the timeless message that continues to be relevant today, and is the only painting in Rockwell's series that is based upon a specific event.
On November 9, 1940, the Memorial School in Rockwell's town of Arlington, Vermont, burned down. A replacement school was offered for approval and townspeople voted to borrow funds at a Town Meeting that Rockwell attended. Commissioned to produce illustrations based on Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, the artist struggled to come up with ideas. "Then one night as I was tossing in bed, mulling over the proclamation and the war, rejecting one idea after another and getting more and more discouraged... I suddenly remembered how Jim Edgerton has stood up in town meeting and said something that everyone else disagreed with. Rockwell wrote. "But they had let him have his say. No one had shouted him down. My gosh, I thought, that's it... Freedom of Speech... I'll express the ideas in simple, everyday scenes."
A farmer and a neighbor of Rockwell's, Edgerton was hit hard by the collapse of milk prices during the Depression and an outbreak of disease among his herd. The impact of additional taxes would have been a challenge for Edgerton, who, in the words of his son Buddy, "held everyone's full attention as he passionately outlined his minority position. Finishing with thanks and a nod of his head, he sat down; and then the townpeople voted to build the new school." Rockwell is a witness to the scene here; he appears on the left glancing up at the speaker, who is modeled not by Edgerton but by the more Lincolnesque Carl Hess, also a neighbor. |