Relevant Vintage

Winter Weekend Inspires

Spent a quiet weekend in the Berkshires, relaxing, antiquing, and just enjoying the quiet winter solitude. We visited the Norman Rockwell Museum, in the quaint New England town of Stockbridge, MA. What an inspiration!

I have always been drawn to Rockwell's work, especially the mid-century images that he portrayed in his paintings, Saturday Evening Post Covers and magazine illustrations. This weekend I realized why! I found myself staring into each of his highly detailed paintings, and do you know what I saw? A great Croc doctors bag, or fabulously dressed 50's ladies, the shoes, the purses, the hats!!! I have always been a hat girl, and relish the era when hats, nice hats, were in.

I also love what these paintings represented about society. Small town living, politics, and family, shot through with a sharp sense of wit. Some of my favorites were Rockwell's 4 Freedoms, done in 1943. The paintings depicted Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. He was paid $10,000 to do these paintings, and they then generated over $132 million in the sale of war bonds. I fell headfirst into some of these paintings and took a step back into time. You can buy the prints here.