Existing comment:
Norman Rockwell
Freedom of Worship, 1942
Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, February 27, 1943
Rockwell's Freedom of Worship envisions a world without religious discrimination. At first, the artist experimented with a composition featuring an amiable gathering of religious and social types in a country barbershop. He ultimately rejected the idea in favor of this more solemn image of contemplative worshippers of diverse faiths, ages, and races united in a shallow space and bathes in an ethereal golden light. Above them reads the inscription "Each according to the dictates of his own conscience." The composition departs from Rockwell's typical narrative focus, but the artist considered it one of the strongest of his Four Freedoms series. |