- His middle name was Perceval.
- He judged the first Miss America contest in 1922.
- He saw himself primarily as a storyteller in the Dickensian mode.
- He claimed to be an illustrator rather than an artist.
- He disliked driving but loved to walk, and preferred walking uphill to walking down hill.
- He was an excellent square-dancer.
- He lived in Vermont for 14 years without painting a single landscape. His response, when a friend pointed out a beautiful vista, was "Thank Heavens I don't have to paint it!"
- He drank Coca-Cola for breakfast.
- To generate ideas for pictures, he had to isolate himself and then imagine boys playing around a lamppost.
- He was in therapy for years with psychoanalyst Erik Erikson.
- The Saturday Evening Post once told him to remove an African American from a group picture because the magazine's policy was to only show Blacks in service-industry jobs. He complied, but later became an ardent civil rights supporter.
- He had difficulty expressing anger and was only seen to lose his temper three times, once when a man refused to sell the artist his hat for a large sum of money.
- He "had no difficulty finding friends who were inordinately devoted to him."
- He "required the nearly constant companionship of men whom he perceived as physically strong."
- He was compulsive about cleanliness and swept his studio 4 - 6 times daily.
- He always wore shoes that were too small.
- John Updike once said that Rockwell had a "surreally expressive vocabulary of shoes."
- His first wife left him for another man after 14 year of marriage. His second wife was an alcoholic. His biographer implies (but never actually states) that Rockwell was a man with repressed homoerotic tendencies who finally found happiness with his 3rd wife, a closeted lesbian.
- He was friends with Walt Disney.
- The record price for a Rockwell painting is15.4 million, a price about which, according to his biographer, he would feel "incredulous."
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20 Things I Learned About Norman Rockwell From American Mirror, The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
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