Returning to Rockwell’s ‘Saying Grace’ America, by Anthony Esolen

Three score and twelve years ago, the Saturday Evening Post featured a cover for Thanksgiving illustrated by the celebrated and much-loved Norman Rockwell. It is called Saying Grace. Ten years ago, the original sold for $46 million, then a record for any single American painting. I am glad of it, because Rockwell had been scorned as a mere illustrator, a mere realist in style, and a mere sentimentalist in subject and treatment. I hope his heirs can take that scorn and break a bank with it.

It presents us, though, with a puzzle. We don’t wonder that there should be a fissure between what the self-styled experts were praising and what the public enjoyed. Such fissures do develop. …