Drawing a smile on faces

You paint your happiness," Norman Rockwell's psychoanalyst once told him, "but you don't live it." The most famous American illustrator of the 20th century, acclaimed as "America's best-loved artist" and "the Dickens of the paintbrush", Rockwell has become synonymous with sweetly humorous, almost simple-minded portrayals of domestic contentment. Yet behind them lurks a more troubled personality than is generally supposed.

In one of his best-known images, an elderly lady, overseen by her fond-faced husband, heaves a roast turkey on to a laden, white-clothed table, ringed by the laughing, expectant faces of the younger members of her family. The scene isn't entirely idealised (the old lady wears glasses) but her expression of modest, yet tender devotion to this most American of celebrations — Thanksgiving — speaks volumes about the image's intentions.

Part of a series, The Four Freedoms, created during the Second World War, it sold 25 million copies, raising vast sums for the war effort and becoming one of the most widely distributed works of art in history. Rockwell is associated with a wholesome, patriotic, apple-pie and picket-fence conception of Middle America. On his home territory, he is identified with these things to the extent that the idea of the "Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving Dinner" is something every American implicitly understands — that every American, whatever their background, can achieve through hard work and the American way. Rockwell, who is receiving his first major British exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, was a constant presence in American life through most of the 20th century. He was an affable, avuncular figure, rake-thin, with sloping shoulders and a pipe perpetually jammed between his teeth. He created 322 covers for The Saturday Evening Post, America's most popular magazine, between 1916 and 1963 — images that were looked forward to with an avidity unimaginable today.

Rockwell's art represents America before the Fall: pre-drugs, pre-Vietnam, set in a timeless, small-town world, where life retains a pioneer cohesiveness. In the relatively early Good For Another Generation of 1923, an elderly horologist puts the final touch to a grandfather clock that will keep on ticking for decades in Rockwell's unchanging world. In Father's Return Home, painted 50 years later, wife, children and dog rush with wild enthusiasm to meet Dad at the front door. And where has he come from? Why, simply back from work. The celebration of the daily domestic round is enough.

In a changing world

Yet since the Sixties, as ideas of American identity, ethnicity and gender have become increasingly embattled, Rockwell, a purveyor of what used to be called "gentle humour", who wished to do nothing more than entertain, has become controversial.

In Woody Allen's Annie Hall, the eponymous central character, played by Diane Keaton, refers to her grandmother as "Grammy Hall", to which Allen's character reacts with incredulity: "What d'you do, grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting?" The inference is clear: Keaton's character, from a secure Wasp background, belongs in Rockwell's America; Allen's, from a precariously situated, immigrant Jewish family, doesn't.

Even a view of America as recent as Mad Men, BBC4's ineffably stylish drama set in advertising in the Sixties, draws heavily and knowingly on Rockwell, with the lead character, Don Draper, and his wife moving out of Manhattan to an idyllically Rockwellian small town. The place turns out to be populated by hypocrites, the wife succumbs to depression and the children exhibit signs of delinquency. In this sophisticated, metropolitan view, the Rockwell life leads to alienation and mental illness. As soon as she realises her husband doesn't belong in this poker-faced, quasi-rustic world, Draper's wife drops him for a right-wing political fixer. But then, it could be argued that the vast majority of those consuming Rockwell's images didn't belong in this world, and neither did the artist himself — certainly not by birthright.

Indeed, while the Fifties' McCarthyite witch hunt can be said to have come into being to protect Rockwell's America from a perceived leftist threat, the man himself was by no means an unthinking conservative.

Born in New York in 1894, the son of a white-collar worker, Rockwell grew up in extremely modest circumstances in a succession of boarding houses. He trained at the National Academy of Design and by 19 was art editor of Boys' Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. He was essentially a cartoonist, of the old-fashioned kind who deals not in punchlines but in whimsical narrative moments, which he realised in oils, using techniques derived from the old masters — a way of working that was then common in commercial art, before being superseded by more modest media such as gouache, watercolour and digital image-making.

Rockwell was married three times, always to schoolteachers, but it was only when he moved to Arlington, Vermont, in 1939, when he was already 45, that his quintessential small-town imagery crystallised. And for all his apparently unflagging optimism, his work's insistence on humanity's essential goodness, Rockwell was prone to depression, as was his severely alcoholic second wife, Mary. In 1953, they moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, so they could receive treatment from Erik Erikson, the pioneering psychologist and psychoanalyst who coined the term "identity crisis".

But it was when he was still living in Arlington that Rockwell created his most famous works, The Four Freedoms. Attending a town meeting, where a man whose views went against the majority was listened to with respect, Rockwell conceived of a series of paintings illustrating each of the four principles of human rights outlined by Franklin D. Roosevelt, in defence of which America was joining the Second World War. It took Rockwell seven months to create the four oil paintings, using Arlington residents as models: Freedom From Want, showing the laden Thanksgiving table; Freedom of Speech, showing the stranger speaking at the town meeting; Freedom of Worship, with its worn New England faces absorbed in prayer; and Freedom From Fear, with a couple gazing at their sleeping children. When Rockwell took the paintings to Washington's Office of War Information, he received an indifferent response. The government was planning to use "real" artists in their propaganda efforts, rather than commercial artists, as they had during the First World War.

When Rockwell's Four Freedoms were eventually published in The Saturday Evening Post, there were millions of requests for reprints. Reproduced in post offices, schools, clubs and railway stations across America, their success was a powerful example of a peculiarly American approach to external conflict: the idea that it is what is being defended that counts; what is being fought about and against is almost irrelevant. Rather than showing the horrors besetting Europe, Rockwell portrays Middle American life in near religious terms.

Political turn

On his remarriage after his wife Mary's death from a heart attack in 1953, Rockwell began to address some of America's more perplexing aspects. Supporting Kennedy against Nixon, he tackled the subject of civil rights in The Problem We All Live With, showing a young African-American girl escorted to school in New Orleans by a group of US marshals. Rockwell emphasises the girl's courage and vulnerability by cropping the marshals' towering figures at shoulder height. Yet this image of the Sixties remains grounded in 19th-century pictorial convention.

While professing to be nothing more than an illustrator, Rockwell craved acclaim as an artist. If the new Dulwich exhibition goes some way towards accommodating this notion, hanging his pictures alongside works by Rembrandt and Gerrit Dou for stylistic reference, such comparisons merely reinforce the fact that he is a Victorian illustrator hanging on in the era of Auschwitz and rock 'n' roll. The homely conservatism of his style may have been as much a factor in his appeal as his folksy subject matter, but his skill and fluency with brush and pencil are very much what you would expect from a commercial artist of his time. As art, Rockwell is kitsch but as illustration, his is pure genius.

One of the last images in the Dulwich exhibition, The Right to Know, from 1968, demonstrates the essential generosity of Rockwell's vision. Among those caught in the near-mystical glow of the American Constitution's enshrinement of the right to knowledge are a single mother with a child, an African-American family and a young hippy couple — captured with a lot more acuity than you would expect from a 74-year-old. Rockwell admitted that he painted things not as they are but "as I would like them to be" — and that clearly included a great deal more than the small-town Middle America with which his name is associated.

‘Rockwellesque' art

Norman Rockwell was America's best-known and best-loved illustrator for more than six decades of the 20th century. Astonishingly prolific, he is best-known for the 322 covers he created for ‘The Saturday Evening Post' but he painted countless other magazine illustrations and advertisements, capturing images of everyday American life with a humour and power of observation that spoke directly to the public, whose love for his work never wavered. These good-natured, often very funny, occasionally sweetly sentimental images picturing America as he wished it to be, rather than as it perhaps was, gave rise to an adjective, "Rockwellesque", which in some critics' minds became something of a dirty word. But his output was not all sugar and spice — he recorded political events, portrayed presidents and on occasion painted searing images in support of the civil rights movement.

Although Rockwell himself was happy to be described as "an illustrator", his illustrations were executed with considerable technical skill in oils, and these original paintings have increased dramatically in value since his death in 1978. Recent years have seen a critical reassessment of his work. In 1999, ‘The New Yorker' art critic Peter Schjeldahl led the way with his bold statement in ‘ArtNews': "Rockwell is terrific. It's become too tedious to pretend he isn't." This exhibition will be the first of his original works in Britain. It will include all 322 covers of ‘The Saturday Evening Post', created between 1916 and 1963, along with illustrations for advertisements, magazines and books, providing a comprehensive look at his career.

- Information courtesy: Dulwich Picture Gallery

Norman Rockwell's America is on at London's Dulwich Picture Gallery until March 27.