The Family Tree Norman Rockwell painted for the Post in 1959

Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree was a Post cover of 1959

Family Tree is an oil on canvas that Norman Rockwell painted as a cover for The Saturday Evening Post. The Norman Rockwell Museum audio tour dates the cover 24 October 1959 and lists the painting in the Norman Rockwell Museum Collection of the Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust, number NRACT.1973.7. The Post’s own cover gallery gives the same date, while its Rockwell Files article of 7 February 2019 captions the cover 25 October 1959.

Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree is a single tree that climbs the whole height of the cover. Faces sit along its branches in couples, one generation above another, so that the painting reads as a family tree of one American boy drawn as a tree in the old sense. The museum’s audio tour calls it a trip through American history, and the Post article reports that Rockwell said this cover took him longer than any other.

This guide does not show Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree or a copy of it. The Post names Curtis Licensing as its licensing arm for copyrighted illustrations, Rockwell’s among them. The museum’s audio tour and the Post article both show the cover beside their text, and the links on this page lead there.

Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree climbs from a pirate to a boy

The museum’s audio tour reads the Family Tree Norman Rockwell painted from the roots upward. At the root are a swarthy pirate and his bashful Spanish señora, with the ships of the pirate story behind them. The generations then move up past the colonial era until the Civil War divides them. On the left a Southern branch rises through frontier days and the Wild West. On the right a Northern branch zigzags from conservative New England into the 1920s. At the top, as the tour puts it, sits a cheery boy, the culmination of the centuries.

The museum’s print shop adds that the lineage begins with a Spanish princess taken by a pirate from a sinking Spanish galleon. The Post article describes the same pair as a pirate and a princess seized from the galleon in the lower corner.

No source this guide could open lists every figure of Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree one generation at a time. The table below therefore sets out the parts of the tree as the museum’s audio tour and Rockwell’s own working notes describe them, and it claims no more. It is a reading aid written for this page, not a copy of the painting.

Heads that touch a branch belong to the bloodline

The Post article explains how to read Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree. Rockwell indicated the bloodline by the heads that touch the branches. A face that does not touch the wood married into the family.

His working notes on the cover study, a charcoal drawing in the museum’s collection, show him making that rule strict. He removed the connections between the tree and an aristocrat’s wife and a barmaid, so that only members of the direct line stay attached. He also planned red hair for the descendants on one side, starting with the girl who married the Union soldier, so that the red hair rises through the generations to the boy at the top.

These are the same marks a family tree chart uses in other forms. A line of descent joins parent to child, and a spouse who married in sits beside the line. The red hair works as a colour key that follows one inherited trait up the tree.

One neighbour modelled nearly every man on the tree

The museum’s audio tour gives the voices of two people who knew the painting. Peter Rockwell, the painter’s son, says that Rockwell’s neighbour Frank Dolson modelled for every man on the tree but one. Dolson himself says that he can be recognised by a broad bridge at the top of his nose, which runs through every male figure.

The one exception is the mournful preacher near the middle of the tree, whose face is Rockwell’s own. Dolson says that Rockwell painted himself as the preacher and made Dolson the preacher’s wife. The Post article agrees that the austere New England minister is Rockwell, and that most of the men came from the same model. The print shop page puts it differently, saying that Rockwell used the same model for either the man or the woman in each couple.

The repeated face is the joke and the point of Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree. Pirate, soldiers, westerner and preacher share one set of features, so the family likeness carries through every change of costume.

Rockwell argued with himself about the pirate at the root

The Post article sets the painting in Rockwell’s life. In 1959 he was dictating his autobiography to his son Tom and thinking back over his own family history. He struggled with the cover for months, because each face had to carry a character of its own and because he could not decide who should found the family.

He began with the pirate and the princess. A friend objected to starting the family with a cutthroat, so Rockwell replaced the pirate with a Puritan, then replaced the Puritan with a buccaneer, and at last went back to the pirate. His reason, as the Post quotes him, was that everyone has a horse thief or two in the family. On the cover study he also records a visit from Erik, who advised him to make a limb heavier where it nears the cut trunk.

The shape of Norman Rockwell’s Family Tree came from older art. The print shop says that the structure is taken from a twelfth-century Dutch family tree, found for Rockwell by the reference librarian at the Berkshire Athenaeum. The galleon and the pirate follow paintings by Howard Pyle, Rockwell’s favourite illustrator of historical subjects, whose initials appear on the treasure chest.

Draw your own family tree with the same three rules

The Family Tree Norman Rockwell painted follows rules any family tree can use. Put the founders at the root and the youngest at the top, join only blood relatives to the line, and keep each spouse beside the person they married. Where a story about an ancestor cannot be proved, mark the line as uncertain rather than leave it out.

In the editor, an uncertain line of descent can be drawn as uncertain parentage, and a note can hold the family story beside it. A trait such as red hair can be given a colour, so that it can be followed up the chart as Rockwell followed it up his tree.