Norman Rockwell is renowned for his depictions of daily life in small town and rural America. His subjects include Boy Scouts, ball players, mothers, children, grandpas and grandmas and the like.
The second child of Jarvis Waring Rockwell and his wife Nancy, Norman Perceval Rockwell was born in New York City, in a decrepit brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As a young child, he enjoyed idyllic summers in the country, primarily New Jersey and upstate New York, an experience that remained with him for the remainder of his life and one that had a profound impact on his later choice of iconography.
While attending high school, Rockwell decided to pursue a career as an illustrator. In 1908, he began commuting to New York to study at the Chase School of Fine and Applied Art, and at the age of fifteen he quit high school to enroll in classes at the National Academy of Design. However, finding the Academy's curriculum geared towards training the fine artist rather than the illustrator, he left a year later and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying anatomy under George Bridgman and illustration with Thomas Fogarty.
