English
Norman Rockwell (1894 – 1978)
Crestwood Commuter Station 1946
Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, November 16, 1946
Oil on canvas
Private Collection
© 1946 SEPS – Curtis Publishing
Crestwood Train Station is located in the New York suburb of Tuckahoe in Westchester County. Norman Rockwell grew up in New York City and spent the first 40 years of his career living and working in the New York area, first in Mamaroneck and later in New Rochelle.
In this work, Norman Rockwell abandoned his usual practice of making people the focus of his painting. Instead of an intimate character study, he portrays the hustle and bustle of a crowded suburban railroad platform in the year following the end of World War II. This was a time that many Americans moved to rapidly growing suburbs in search of green lawns and the allure of the so-called “American Dream.” These same commuters were also Rockwell’s prime audience as likely readers of The Saturday Evening Post.
Although this painting is one of only a small number of landscapes or streetscapes he created over the course of his career, Rockwell is still interested in telling a human story with the scene.
In the top of the image, the suburban homes appear in the distance as flat two-dimensional objects. In contrast to the crowded train platform om the foreground, the homes above appear empty and quiet as if awaiting the return of their occupants at the end of the work day.
As we move toward the viewer, Rockwell employs more depth and dimension, first with men and women running horizontally across the image to the arriving train on the right. He then creates a higher sense of urgency and immediacy by having people running inward, away from the viewer, toward the station at the bottom of the image.
To underscore a sense of drama, Rockwell depicts a woman donning curlers leaning out of a car window to kiss her husband as she drops him off, presumably because they left their house in a hurry to get to the station on time. Not to mention, the commuters stopping to buy a paper from the fresh-faced newsboy selling papers to the commuters. Are they going to miss the train?
It is up to the viewer to decide their fate.