Object Record
Images
Metadata
Object |
Drawing |
Title |
A Scout is Helpful |
Artist/Creator |
Rockwell, Norman |
Date |
1939 |
Description |
Charcoal draft rendering of Norman Rockwell's painting "A Scout is Helpful". Teenage boy in Boy Scout uniform carrying young girl wrapped in quilt through floodwater. Small black and white cat perched on his shoulder. Part of wood frame building askew in background. |
Width (inches) |
24.000 |
Height (inches) |
34.000 |
Information |
Looking to escape the hustle and bustle of the New York City suburbs, famed illustrator Norman Rockwell and his family bought a house in the quaint rural village of Arlington, Vermont in 1938. Not long after, he received a commission to create the cover art for a Boy Scouts of America calendar. One of the key tenets of the Boy Scouts was to prepare budding citizens to make sacrifices for the greater good, and they made a persuasive case through calendar art of scenes with no moral ambiguity. The hurricane of September 1938, which devastated Long Island and much of New England, provided the inspiration for A Scout is Helpful. Rockwell’s new friend and real estate agent, Burt Immen, volunteered his daughter, Mary, to serve as the model for the little girl in A Scout is Helpful. When Mary arrived at Rockwell’s studio accompanied by her mother, she was dressed in her Sunday best, with her hair done up in perfectly coiffed curls. Rockwell immediately told her that she was modeling for a young girl being saved from a flood. With Mrs. Immen’s permission, Rockwell stripped Mary down into her slip, got her hair wet and tussled, and provided her with an old quilt in which to wrap herself. Rockwell designed and developed the compositions for his images meticulously, typically developing a full-scale charcoal drawing as the final step before beginning the full-color painting in oils. His sketches often rivaled his paintings in complexity, with all of the composition being worked out before a brush ever touched canvas. |
Related People |
Rockwell, Norman Hall, Mary Immen Young, Horace Jr. |
Credit line |
Musuem Purchase |
Catalog Number |
2023.19.1 |