Even in the age of prediction markets, there are few sure bets. One of them: Everyone reading this has seen a Norman Rockwell. The artist was best known for the more than 300 covers he illustrated for the Saturday Evening Post from 1916 to 1963. He populated them with quintessentially American small-town characters: plucky kids, nosy neighbors, a goofy GI. While his scenes are widely considered to represent Anytown, USA, many of them are modeled on the southern Vermont town of Arlington.
This summer at Shelburne Museum, “Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont,” on view through October 25, makes the connection clear. “Rockwell not only was informed and inspired by Arlington,” curator Carolyn Bauer said on a tour of the show, “he was at all the swing dances, all the PTA meetings. He did all the art fair judging. He bought a portion of a cemetery. He was part of the fabric of that community, through and through, during the 14 years he lived there.”
While his scenes are widely considered to represent Anytown, USA, many of them are modeled on Arlington.
Rockwell and his wife moved to Vermont in 1938, seeking to escape the growing suburb of New Rochelle, N.Y., for somewhere more rural. Deciding that Bennington and Dorset were “a little too posh for their taste,” according to the exhibition catalog, they bought a 60-acre farmstead less than 24 hours after setting foot in Arlington.
Rockwell was a singular figure — he was already nationally well known when he moved to Vermont and continues to be among the most popular American artists of any era — but the exhibition stresses his connections to a wider creative community. Author Dorothy Canfield Fisher lived in Arlington and promoted a vision of rural identity that was similar to Rockwell’s. Folk artist Grandma Moses lived in nearby Hoosick Falls, N.Y., and painted nostalgic scenes of country ways; she became one of Rockwell’s friends late in her life.
The exhibition presents works by contemporaries who also illustrated for the Saturday Evening Post — Mead Schaeffer, George Hughes, John Atherton and Gene Pelham — and who also relocated to Arlington from larger cities. Pelham became Rockwell’s studio assistant and took many of Rockwell’s reference photos, sometimes of his own children.
Melinda Pelham was the baby pictured in “The Babysitter,” from 1947. The squalling infant grabs the red hair of her tween caretaker, who is clearly frustrated but determined as she reads a book titled Hints to the Baby Sitter amid a chaos of toys and her own homework. An original work on loan from the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art, the painting has an unusual detail: a real safety pin, affixed to the canvas as though on the baby’s diaper. Apparently, it was used to prick Melinda’s feet to make her cry for the photos.
Rockwell and Pelham didn’t always resort to such drastic measures. “The Young Lady With the Shiner” pictures then-10-year-old Mary Whalen, disheveled but smiling proudly as she waits outside the principal’s office, sporting a black eye. After trying makeup and charcoal, Rockwell couldn’t quite get the correct color on the bruise. He took out at an ad in the Berkshire Eagle seeking photos of fresh bruises. The winning reference, for which he paid $25, was of a 2-year-old who had fallen down the stairs.
Both Melinda Pelham and Whalen will be joined by other Rockwell models who still live in Vermont in a September 26 panel discussion at Shelburne Museum. It’s part of Rockwell Day, which will also include curatorial tours of the show; a (clothed) figure-drawing session inspired by Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series, prints of which are on view; and a talk by art historian Russell Lord of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts, who will discuss how Rockwell used photography.
Rockwell’s art has always been wildly popular with the general public but not as well received by the art world. When others in the same era were pursuing abstraction and art for art’s sake — some of them, such as Helen Frankenthaler, just down the road at Bennington College — Rockwell’s work was wholly commercial.
The tension between artistic and commercial imagery is visible in some of the pieces in the show, particularly those by John Atherton. Though his “Shaftsbury Railroad Station,” a 1944 Saturday Evening Post cover, centers a quaint, old-timey woodstove in a nostalgic picture, his “Old Barn, Connecticut” is a dark, dilapidated vision of rural life. “Pine Tree” is weirder still, playing with trompe l’oeil perspective and deconstructed architecture in a surreal image.
Though Rockwell’s friends grappled with the conflict between fine art and illustration, Shelburne Museum curator Thomas Denenberg said, “Rockwell was really enjoying his status and didn’t feel the need to be a tortured artist.” Instead, he often incorporated fine-art references and techniques in his commercial work.
That’s clear from the three pieces that spurred the development of the show: 1955’s “Kneeling Girl,” 1963’s “The Craftsman” and a study for “The Craftsman.” Rock of Ages in Barre commissioned the works after Rockwell had moved to Massachusetts. Québec firm Polycor purchased Rock of Ages in 2016 and last year donated the paintings to the Shelburne Museum.
These are unabashedly ads for headstones — the one in “Kneeling Girl,” in particular, seems to gleam in a polished way that’s unusually clean for an image of a graveyard. But with “The Craftsman,” which shows a worker designing a headstone in a granite shed, we can see in Rockwell’s study how he is deeply interested in the geometry of the building, the light, the craftsman’s focus. Gray beams crisscross vertically and horizontally across the space, mirroring the design on the central tombstone, which bears the name “Norwell” — a portmanteau of his own.
Moving from the study to the finished piece, Rockwell emphasized dramatic light — something unusual for him, Bauer said. That and an angel monument, which seems to be watching over the craftsman, lend a Renaissance air to the scene. Rockwell selected George Seivwright, an actual stonecutter at Rock of Ages, as a model for the painting. As much as it’s selling a concept of traditional American culture to the wider world, it’s also celebrating a specific Vermonter. ➆
“Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont,” on view through October 25; Rockwell Day, Friday, September 25, 5:30-6:30 p.m., and Saturday, September 26, 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m., at Shelburne Museum.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Arlington as Apple Pie | An exhibition at Shelburne Museum showcases Norman Rockwell’s connections to community”
This article appears in September 2 • 2026.
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