The Marriage Counselor - Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell was born in New York City in 1894. Already at the age of only 14 he wanted to become an artist. Taking classes at art schools got him closer to the realization of his dream. His passion and talent led to early success. Still in his teens, Norman Rockwell found immediate work as an illustrator for Boys’ Life magazine. This was only the beginning, of a blossoming career, which made him popular all over the world.

As a freelance painter he covered plenty of different topics in his works of art, they all have something in common though. In his illustrations he aimed to show the America he knew by everyday scenes taking place especially in a small-town person’s life. Also, his paintings were often depicted in a humorous way or with a certain simple charm. Norman Rockwell’s pictures make particular use of the aspects of simplification and moral perspective. His drawings turn random or even disconnected events into stories by simplifying, connecting dots and creating story lines. To sum up, they allow us to find useful meaning in everyday events. Anyway, he has often been criticized for moderating lives too sweet and too narrow. 

To create his scenes, Rockwell used to hire models, which he placed carefully for charcoal sketches and even for photographs later on. “Freedom of Speech”, “Freedom to Worship”, “Freedom from Want” and “Freedom from Fear”, which turned out to be enormously popular, earned Norman Rockwell huge success. Over the years he worked for several magazines, such as “Life” or “Literary Digest”. All in all, he is supposed to have created more than three hundred paintings, some of which are nowadays exhibited in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts. 

One of his probably not so popular paintings called “The Marriage Counselor”, which has not even been published, is of particular interest to me. I found it by chance whilst admiring some of Norman Rockwell’s works of art. As soon as I saw it, it made me laugh out loud. The picture shows a couple seated in the waiting room of a marriage counselor. The husband sports a black eye and folds his arms across his chest, while the wife sits beside him, holding his hat in her lap and shooting him a stern look. There is nothing to laugh about the scene itself as it concerns domestic violence, but according to me the presentation is absolutely hilarious. I just love the expressions on the couple’s faces, especially the wife’s one. She is depicted with raised eyebrows, a cockeyed glance and the slightest hint of a sideways grin, almost as if she were proud of herself for giving her husband a shiner and as if she enjoyed the situation. The sulking husband also has raised his eyebrows, but more in a way of expressing his discontent with the situation instead of being smug like his wife, and gazes towards the office of the counselor. That’s what I call a real work of art - capturing an expression so precisely that a whole story is created in one’s mind simply by glancing at the picture.