While he was wildly successful as a commercial illustrator, Norman Rockwell was almost universally dismissed in his day as a shallow artist. So what are we to make of the current campaign to rehabilitate his reputation as a painter? “The present attempt to add Rockwell to the canon of American art is almost exclusively the work of critics. It is not the artists who have adopted Rockwell, but museum directors, curators, and writers on art.” – New York Review of Books