Norman Rockwell and Baseball: Images of the National Pastime

For all the historical research on baseball players, owners, umpires, scouts, sportswriters, broadcasters, fans, and ballparks, one group has been largely neglected: the artists who paint emotive images of the game.¹ Chief among them is America’s “Dickens with a paintbrush,” Norman Rockwell, who for more than half a century included baseball among his enduring paintings of American life and culture. I am not interested here in whether Rockwell was a “serious” artist or a commercial illustrator (he called himself an illustrator, but “commercial artist” seems apt) or in the degree to which his paintings were realistically nostalgic representations of bygone days or idealized imaginations of an invented past. Nor will I speculate whether the emotionally troubling realities of modern life—the horrors of World War I, bloody race riots, xenophobic immigration restrictions, organized crime sprees, degrading urban slums—led him, as a young adult, to creating sentimental depictions of “everyday life” of “common folk” in small towns and rural America during simpler times that were rapidly lost.² My purpose here is to examine how “the People’s Painter” represented the emotions and values popularly associated with baseball, thereby giving credence and exposure to the national pastime as an important social institution and symbol of American culture. (Note: While impractical to reproduce the illustrations, most can easily be accessed via the Internet by searching for “Rockwell” and the name of the painting.)

Norman Perceval Rockwell (1894–1978) grew up on the Upper West Side of New York City. Unlike his brother, Jarvis, the best athlete in school, Norman was self-described as “unathletic.” He was slight of build and slow of foot and wore corrective shoes and glasses. His autobiography recalled swimming and fishing during the family’s annual summer vacations in the country but never mentioned participating in games, although he enjoy watching other kids play baseball and football, even cheering at high school football games.³ Drawing was his interest and his gift. He enrolled in art classes at the New York School of Art at age fourteen, then at the National Academy of Design, launching his professional career in 1913 as the art editor for Boys’ Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America.⁴

His primary life’s work would be producing illustrations for magazine covers. His paintings appeared in forty publications including Boys’ Life, Literary Digest, Country Gentleman, Leslie’s Weekly, Look, and Life; but he became famously known for 323 covers created over forty-seven years for the Saturday Evening Post, the nation’s largest mass-circulation magazine until the 1950s. The Post covers made him America’s most recognized and beloved painter, best known for five iconic 1943 depictions, Rosie the Riveter and The Four Freedoms—Want, Speech, Religion, and Fear. Surprisingly, given his admission that when it came to sports, he wasn’t “God’s gift,” especially “to the baseball coach,” the subject most often depicted in his portfolio—covers, advertisements, calendars, commercial products—is sport, the most numerous being baseball, a game he did not play.⁵

Painting baseball

Rockwell’s first baseball illustrations were for novels and fictional magazine stories written for young male readers. A total of twenty-six visual representations of prose descriptions of game actions, mostly for Leslie W. Quirk in Boy’s Life, were largely conventional depictions of pitchers throwing, batters swinging, fielders fielding, catchers throwing, and base runners sliding. Notable for being well ahead of its time was the unique portrayal of a girl, the star pitcher of a Bess Streeter Aldrich short story whose success against boys made her the “Sensation of Springtime.”⁶ Throughout his career, he drew numerous baseball pictures for commercial and nonprofit advertisements, calendars, and an array of merchandise, most notably Lenox and Franklin Mint collectibles.

But it is Rockwell’s thirty-odd baseball cover paintings, all but two for the Saturday Evening Post, that have come to represent his notable baseball oeuvre. Of the fifty-eight baseball covers the magazine published from 1901 to 1963, Rockwell’s eleven were four times as many as those by any of the other...