“I showed the America I knew,” Norman Rockwell once declared. His America, of course, is the one many of us know and love. We recognize in his famous images the energetic and optimistic folks who are emblematic of this nation’s spirit.
You can immerse yourself in Rockwell’s heart-warming, and sometimes heart-rending, visions of America’s soul at the Tampa Museum of Art. “American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell,” includes his original oil paintings as well as the magazine tear sheets. More than 320 "Saturday Evening Post" covers are in the show from the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
For more than 60 years, this lanky, pipe-smoking fellow, who had the air of a gawky clerk in a country store, set out his vision of this country on magazine covers and illustrations.