Christmas Trio

[NARRATOR]

This trio of mismatched musicians is straight out of the novels of Charles Dickens. When Rockwell was a child, his father would read Dickens aloud to the family. As he read, young Norman would draw the characters based on the author’s fascinating detailed descriptions.

He carried this love of detail into his own work. For example, look at the intricate design of the glasses worn by the man on the left.

Rockwell has been compared to a movie director — gathering props, casting, and then acting out the exact expression he wanted from his models.

[HENNESSEY] Once he began using photography, he really felt that it freed him and allowed him to get much more spontaneous expressions from people, allowed him to get much more active poses….

Rockwell would … take anywhere from 50 to 100 photographs for a given Post cover, getting the folds in the clothing right, getting the position of a hand correct, and then would literally cut these photographs up, cut a hand out of one, a foot out of another, cut one particular view of the setting from yet a third, and put these all together in creating his composition.