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Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell Visits a Family Doctor 1947
Painting for The Saturday Evening Post story illustration, April 12, 1947
Between 1943 and 1948 the Post sent Rockwell on eight visits around the country to record the lives of representative Americans in a pictorial series. For each visual report, the artist produced multiple images in order to document contemporary life in America. He shared with Post readers what it was like to spend a night with paratroopers on a troop train; wait with reporters and photographers to see the President at the White House; apply at a ration board in Manchester, Vermont; vote at a polling station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; visit a newspaper in Monroe County, Missouri; attend a one-room school in rural Georgia; spend a day with a family doctor in Arlington, Vermont; and make the rounds with a county agent in Jay County, Indiana. In Norman Rockwell Visits a Family Doctor, Rockwell interprets a scene of a genuine Vermont family consulting with their doctor in the tradition of Victorian artist Luke Fildes who was admired by Rockwell for his Dickensian interpretation of London's poor. Fildes constructed whole interiors in his studio to be sure his scene was accurate; a preparation Rockwell might have taken had he not had the camera. For Family Doctor, Rockwell recorded the life of his own hometown family physician, Dr. George Russell. He painstakingly reproduced Russell's office, hiring an architect to do drawings of the room since his cameraman couldn't shoot the whole width of the office within the small space. So exact were his details that one reader noticed that the photo on Dr. Russell's desk looked just like a nurse who attended him in an Army hospital in England in 1945. A reply to his letter to the Post confirmed that Dr. Russell's daughter had been a nurse in England in 1945. An Arlington family posed with their baby girl as the patient but the dog, Bozo, was Dr. Russell's. Apparently some people questioned the ethics of permitting a dog in the office but Rockwell said, "nobody ever seemed the worse for it." Dr. George Russell is now well remembered by researchers and historians as the compiler of the most extensive collection of Vermont historical material in the state, collected during his fifty-seven-year career. |