Norman Rockwell
Saying Grace
Cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post, November 24, 1951
Estimate $15/20 million
Masterpieces by Norman Rockwell at Sotheby’s Sotheby’s announced that its American Art auction in New York on 4 December 2013 will offer a great selection of paintings by Norman Rockwell -including his masterpiece ‘Saying Grace’- from the family of Kenneth J. Stuart Sr.]]>
September 24th, 2013, source: Sotheby’s
Kenneth J. Stuart Sr. was the artist’s longtime friend and art editor at the Saturday Evening Post. The seven works to be offered at Sotheby’s are led by two icons of Rockwell’s extensive oeuvre – his singular masterpiece “Saying Grace” (estimate: $15/20 million), voted by Post readers as their favorite cover, and “The Gossips” (estimate: $6/9 million) – as well as “Walking to Church” (estimate: $3/5 million) and a color study for “Breaking Home Ties” (estimate: $200/300,000), the final version of which set the artist’s current auction record when it sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2006 for $15.4 million.
Elizabeth Goldberg, Head of Sotheby’s American Art department, commented: “To offer any one of these masterworks would be a great privilege. To present two of Norman Rockwell’s most iconic works in one auction truly is unprecedented.”
“Saying Grace”
Originally painted for the Thanksgiving issue of the Saturday Evening Post in 1951, Rockwell’s “Saying Grace” was named his most popular cover just four years later in a reader poll that coincided with an exhibition of his work at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. Many of the artist’s favorite models are depicted: his son Jarvis is seated at the table with his back to the window, next to Don Winslow, his studio apprentice at the time.
“The Gossips”
‘Gossip’ was one of Rockwell’s favorite themes, and he explored it more than once over his prolific career. The figures depicted in the present work are his Arlington, Vermont neighbors, whom he posed and photographed, as well as the artist himself and his wife Mary.
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