Image: Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge
Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is showing the full run of cover illustrations that Norman Rockwell produced for The Saturday Evening Post — 323 in all, the earliest dating from 1916 and the latest from 1963. The display is assembled from original tear sheets, the printed cover pages themselves rather than the paintings behind them, so the pictures appear in the form in which readers of the magazine first met them.
The museum frames the sequence around that domestic encounter, noting that for close to fifty years the covers arrived in ordinary homes and became bound up with the daily lives of millions of readers. That account of Rockwell's reach is the museum's own, offered as context for the run of covers rather than as an assessment of the individual pictures.
Biographical material accompanies the covers. Rockwell was born in New York City in 1894 and began art classes at the age of 14 at The New York School of Art, formerly The Chase School of Art. He left high school in 1910 for The National Academy of Design, then moved to The Art Students League, studying with Thomas Fogarty and George Bridgman — the first preparing him for illustration commissions, the second teaching the technical groundwork he used for the rest of his career. He had completed a commission for four Christmas cards before his sixteenth birthday and, still in his teens, was appointed art director of Boys' Life, the Boy Scouts of America's magazine.
All 323 covers are also published in the museum's digital collection, so the sequence can be followed outside the galleries.
No closing date has been announced for the display. The museum opens 10am to 5pm and is closed on Wednesdays; general admission is $25 for adults, with lower rates for seniors, college students and children aged six to eighteen, and free entry for members and children under six. The museum has said the Saturday Evening Post Covers gallery will shut early, at 1.30pm, on Friday 18 September 2026 for a private event. Curator talks attached to a separate exhibition, American Stories: Revolution to Rockwell, are listed beside the covers show on the museum's page, the next on 25 September at 9.30am.
