Freedom from Want is the third in a series of four oil paintings by American artist Norman Rockwell. All of the people in the picture were friends and family of Rockwell in Arlington, Vermont, who were photographed individually and painted into the scene. The painting has had a wide array of adaptations, parodies, and other uses, such as for the cover for the 1946 book NormanRockwell, Illustrator.
About Freedom from Want in brief
Freedom from Want is the third in a series of four oil paintings by American artist Norman Rockwell. The works were inspired by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address, known as Four Freedoms. All of the people in the picture were friends and family of Rockwell in Arlington, Vermont, who were photographed individually and painted into the scene. The painting has had a wide array of adaptations, parodies, and other uses, such as for the cover for the 1946 book NormanRockwell, Illustrator. The illustration is an oil painting on canvas, measuring 45. 75 by 35. 5 inches. The Norman Rock well Museum describes it as a story illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, complementary to the theme, but the image is also an autonomous visual expression. The painting shows an aproned matriarch presenting a roasted turkey to a family of several generations,. The patriarch looks on with fondness and approval from the head of the table, which is the central element of the painting. Its creased tablecloth shows that this is a special occasion for \”sharing what we have with those we love\”, according to Lennie Bennett. The table has a bowl of fruit, celery, pickles, and what appears to be cranberry sauce. There is a covered silver serving dish that would traditionally hold potatoes, according to Richard Halpern, but Bennett describes this as a covered casserole dish.
The people are not yet eating, and the painting contrasts the empty plates and vacant space in their midst with images of overabundance. The image was popular at the time in the United States and remains so, but it caused resentment in Europe where the masses were enduring wartime hardship. In mid-November, 1942, Rockwell wrote to editor Ben Hibbs pleading that he not scrap his third work to start over. Hibbs pressured Rockwell into completing his work by warning him that the magazine was on the verge of being compelled by the government to use four-color printing, so he had to get the work published before the halftone printing was halftoned. In 1942, Hibbs explained that the illustrations only needed to address the same topic rather than be in unison rather than being in unison. Eventually, the series was widely distributed in poster form and became instrumental in the U.S. Government War Bond Drive. The Four Freedom’s theme was eventually incorporated into the Atlantic Charter, and it became part of the charter of the United Nations. In the early 1940s, the government used them to help boost patriotism. The series of paintings ran in The Saturday evening Post accompanied by essays from noted writers on four consecutive weeks.
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This page is based on the article Freedom from Want published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
