Very competent magazine illustrator. A ton of technical skill, but his work has the depth of a holiday greeting card.

De Kooning collected norman Rockwell.

Shows that Capitalism may be the best economic system, but is definitely not conducive to producing great art. Rockwell is an extremely successful illustrator and extremely mediocre fine artist, although proclaiming his work as a 'major disservice to our collective consciousness' is laughably over the top.

Platitudes on paper. One of the most indecently awful artists ever to acquire the name. Squidgy, corny, gagworthy and utterly wretched, and desperately in need of a National Lampoon retrospective.

This man was an illustrator really, as the bulk of his work was executed for use in popular magazines of his time. He did have very fine, clean, acomplished technique: balanced colorist, remarkably skillful and adroit with the brush, understood the trickery of light in pictorial space, etc., but it takes more than that to be a great artist. To begin with, there's nothing innovative or daring about his work and Rockwell avoided addressing the mechanical problems of painting in favor of churning out easily-recognizable, non-threatening, easily-digestible, tepid, feelgood renderings that were firmly entrenched in the conventional and sentimental. In this, his work in highly decorative. Secondly, Rockwell tried to compete with the photograph in his ultra-realistic depictions of material reality, and by the time he came along, artists had long abandoned this effort due to its futility and took painting to a different and higher conceptual plane. Rockwell failed to follow this cultural dominant because he was little concerned, like his contemporaries, by this shift in aesthetic ethos. This was not a matter of artistic bravery or innovative boldness, this was a matter of a popular illustrator appeasing a middle and low-brow audience so that he could rake in the $$$$. In this, Rockwell is a hack, albeit a very well-paid one. Furthermore, his subject matter is quite prosaic and predictable, his presentation is often excessively maudlin and the valence of his images is so squeaky-clean and idealized to the point of being absolutely unrealistic. This is a contradiction: an illustrator who possesses ultra-realistic technique depicting mythological images of Americana that never really existed. If this were deliberate, Rockwell would have had a high-regarded reassessment in technical and aesthetic terms during The Age of Irony, but since this was in large part unselfconscious, his appeal these days is exclusively nostalgic. Of course, his work is a major contribution to the self-deluding and revisionist aspects of American consciousness, a sugarcoating of the past that's at complete odds with reality, an exercise in denial and selective memory. Rockwell's subjects are of a make-believe America that too many people assume is truly The Way Things Were, which is, of course, ludicrous, and in this, his work is a major disservice to our collective consciousness. Rockwell's work is a prime example of great technical talent wasted by questionable artistic judgment, a neglect of the true responsibilities of art and the artist, a disinterest in visual ambiguities and the challenges of pictorial space, a pandering to an unsophisticated audience and an over-reliance on fairy tale imagery. Too bad, because the man had quite an accomplished brush.

He was very popular amongst the white supremacy crowd, but I am not a part of their society sooo.....Rockwell isn't exactly my type.

He is vastly overrated. His art is boring and insipid and conforming.

What was this loser trying to say? You have to be wholesome?!?!? Wholesomeness is overrated. He didn't depict realism, He depicted his little happy society.

White Trailer Trash Propagonda.

God, I hate this guy. His coloring skills look like he puked and fecal matter and painted with that! Compare some of his 1940's crap to Bill Stoneham's The hands That Resist Him. Stoneham actually has skills. Norman Rockwell just painted fake wholesome scenes.

The most moving and nostalgic artist I know of. One painting could tell an entire story. His work appealed to the best in us. He made me wish I could be an artist like that.

I am rating him as an illustrator rather than a fine artist. But as an illustrator he is one of my heroes. He rendered things realistically and his work is esthetically pleasing. And all of his illustrations told a little story.

Norman Rockwell is one of my favorite artists. His work is a slice of America. Painting his portraits to show everyday life. His paintings go from the early 1900s to about the 1970s{not too sure when he stopped painting}. His eye for detail in his paintings is remarkable. His paintings can be humorous, serious, and heartwarming.

Good ol' boy. Did some hick art and everyone loves him. Its not powerful or moving. It is also much to darkly shaded for what he intended. Norman attempted to be a political speaker via painting but did a poor job.

Sure, he got a lot of jobs that could qualify him as a "commercial artist," but his paintings had such humor and things that people could relate to back in the day and even nowadays. I think the first time I actually appreciated an art museum was when I visited the Rockwell Museum. I have a print of his painting of him painting himself (you have to see it to believe it). Other favorites of mine are Gossip, The Problem We Live With (an African-American girl being escorted to school by military officers), and of course the Four Freedoms.

Almost no one could capture Americana like Rockwell could. Much of his work is so memorable. Far in the future people will be able to glimpse back into how simple life was at one time.

I appreciate his great skill as an illustrator. However, over the years, his work has become so over-exposed and over-marketed it has really become kind of monotonous and about as interesting as your 20th trip to Disneyland - you can still appreciate it but there certainly aren't going to be any surprises. Overall, he was very successful in capturing the sentimental, sweet, and comic side of life with a certain amount of truth mixed liberally with mid-twentieth century idealism.