Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth paintings in the spotlight in Reading [Unscripted column] | Entertainment - Pennsylvania News Beep

More than 40 years ago, I was shopping in the Lehigh Valley Mall when I passed a store that featured artwork and other home decor.

Next to the entrance was a framed poster that caused me instantly to tear up.

It reminded me so much of my family, and my childhood, that it made me emotional.

It was Norman Rockwell’s “Sunday Morning (Easter Sunday),” and featured a mom, a boy and two girls dressed for church, walking behind a chair on which the dad slouched in his bathrobe and slippers, cigarette in hand, reading a section of the morning newspaper that was spread at his feet.

That was my family — my mom, my sister, my brother and me heading for church, while my dad stayed home with the Sunday paper.

A May 16, 1959, Saturday Evening Post cover, featuring Norman Rockwell’s “Sunday Morning,” hangs in a Rockwell/N.C. Wyeth exhibit in the Reading Public Museum.

MARY ELLEN WRIGHT | Staff

I bought that framed poster on the spot, and it hung on the wood-paneled wall of my family’s home until my parents had passed away. When I joined the Lancaster Sunday News staff in 1986, I saw that same print on the wall of my editor’s office — because of the newspaper’s prominent place in the image.

I realized something through my engagement with that piece of artwork (and the coffee-table book of Rockwell’s art I bought soon after the poster): An artist I had previously considered a journeyman illustrator for magazine covers could really stir up emotions with his work.

I recently immersed myself in Rockwell’s work — along with that of another early 20th-century rock-star illustrator (and Wyeth family patriarch), Newell Convers “N.C.” Wyeth — during my first trip to the Reading Public Museum.

The exhibit “Rockwell/ Wyeth: Icons of Americana,” features about 40 of the full-size paintings these two artists did so that the works could be reduced to the size of the frontispiece of a popular adventure novel (in Wyeth’s case) or a Saturday Evening Post cover (in Rockwell’s).

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Norman Rockwell ( American, 1894-1978), Threading the Needle, 1922, oil on canvas, 34 x 28.75 inches, © 2026 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and the American Illustrators Gallery

N.C. Wyeth Paintings Newport, RI

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Norman Rockwell ( American, 1894-1978), Study for Which One? (Voting Booth), c. 1944, mixed media on paperboard, 20.5 x 16 inches, © 2026 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and the American Illustrators Gallery

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Norman Rockwell ( American, 1894-1978), Till the Boys Come Home, 1918, oil on canvas, 29.5 x 23.5 inches, © 2026 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and the American Illustrators Gallery.

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N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945), The Horse Fell with His Rider to the Bottom of the Cliff, c. 1927, oil on canvas, 40.25 x 30.25 inches, © 2026 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and the American Illustrators Gallery

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N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945), Thorgunna, the Waif Woman, 1914, oil on canvas 44.25 x 32.25 inches, © 2026 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and the American Illustrators Gallery

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N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882 – 1945), Daniel Boone, The Home Seeker—Cumberland Valley, 1936, oil on canvas, 30 x 41 inches, The Home Insurance Company calendar, 1938, also printed as Everett Webster Insurance calendar, Peterboro, NH, © 2026 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and the American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY

Their works, including gallery rooms filled with 300 of Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers, are mounted on dark-cranberry-colored walls that somehow heighten the emotion of looking carefully at these two men’s images.

Rockwell and Wyeth were true storytellers through their art. In Wyeth’s case, it was literal storytelling, illustrating such novels as “Treasure Island,” “Robin Hood” and “Robinson Crusoe.” Rockwell illustrated decades of American history — through wars and presidents and changing social movements — in his magazine covers.

At the Reading Public Museum, I talked with the curator, Scott Schweigert of Lititz, who said the exhibit “pairs two of sort of arguably the most important American illustrators from the Golden Age. … It brings together sort of a focus on each of the artists individually, and sort of the parallels that their careers took in both print and national publications.”

The exhibit “tries to frame their distinct styles, and in some cases, there’s a little bit of crossover,” Schweigert said. “There’s a few Rockwells that look very much like Wyeth and vice versa … .

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“We think we know these artists, but this is an opportunity to sort of re-engage with them as fine artists and as illustrators,” he said, and see “just how important these artists were. They showed up in people’s mailboxes every week. More people saw illustrations by Rockwell and Wyeth than set foot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a year.”

They had a large audience, he noted, but were seen by some “as sort of populist art. It was seen as not serious. But as you go through the show, I think you can see … just how sort of sensitively these things are painted,” Schweigert said. “We hope that visitors will sort of walk away with a new understanding and a new appreciation of just how extraordinary they were as painters.”

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William Karaffa, “Seeking 969, oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches, copyright of the artist, courtesy of Allied Artists of America. The Allied Artists exhibit is on view through Jan. 3 at the Reading Public Museum.

Allied Artists of America exhibit in Reading

While you are at the Reading Public Museum for the Rockwell/Wyeth exhibit, check out the 100 works by contemporary artists in the 113th annual Allied Artists of America show.

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Thomas Torak, Still Life with Seascape, oil on linen, 20 x 24 inches, copyright of the artist, courtesy of Allied Artists of America. The Allied Artists exhibit is on view through Jan. 3 at the Reading Public Museum.

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Steve Scheuring, Day After Christmas, oil on canvas, 37 x 37 inches, copyright of the artist, Courtesy of Allied Artists of America. The Allied Artists exhibit is on view through Jan. 3 at the Reading Public Museum.

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Michael Neal, Maine Summer, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, copyright of the artist, Courtesy of Allied Artists of America. The Allied Artists exhibit is on view through Jan. 3 at the Reading Public Museum.

While you are at the Reading Public Museum for the Rockwell/Wyeth exhibit, check out the 100 works by contemporary artists in the 113th annual Allied Artists of America show.

Paintings, up close and personal

It’s a treat to see Wyeth’s and Rockwell’s original oil paintings in this exhibit, in their original large sizes, before they were shrunk down for book pages and magazine covers.

A few years ago, I had seen an exhibit of Wyeth’s published works — illustrating novels and magazine stories — at the Brandywine Museum of Art, where they shared the building with art by N.C.’s son, Andrew, and grandson, Jamie. That exhibit, and the Reading Museum one, reminded me just how cool it is to consume a book in which an artist’s illustration makes you want to pause your reading and stare at it to help you immerse yourself in the world of the story.

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Wyeth’s impressionistic brush strokes, color choices and interesting compositions of human forms really drew me in at the Reading exhibit.

There’s the eye-popping “Thorgunna, The Waif Woman,” featuring a stern woman in a brightly colored dress, sitting in a Viking ship. It’s a 1914 illustration for a Robert Louis Stevenson story in Scribner’s Magazine.

Long before Mel Gibson shouted “Freedom” in the film “Braveheart,” Wyeth painted William Wallace and his children — in kilts and feathered hats, one juggling a massive sword — descending an impressive stone staircase for Jane Porter’s book “The Scottish Chiefs.”

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I could feel the terror in the contorted limbs of a man and his horse — probably about to lose their lives — in Wyeth’s “The Horse Fell with His Rider to the Bottom of the Cliff,” an illustration for Jules Verne’s book, “Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar.” Reins flying, the horse scatters bits of gravel as the two figures drop.

One of my Rockwell favorites in the exhibit is a well-dressed man standing — with a quizzical look on his face — in a green-curtained voting booth for “Which One?” It’s a painted study for the final magazine cover, displayed next to it in the exhibit. Look carefully, and you’ll see the man has a newspaper under his arm that shows his choice is between Thomas Dewey and Franklin Roosevelt for president.

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For Life magazine in 1918, Rockwell captures the anxious looks and poses of four women in dresses, sitting on a rock overlooking water, in “Till the Boys Come Home” — a tribute to the women waiting on the home front of World War I.

It’s fun to see an original painting and the Saturday Evening Post cover side by side in the exhibit, as in Rockwell’s “Threading the Needle.” It’s filled with little Rockwellian details: the man’s tongue sticking out in concentration as he threads — a cat at his feet, a newspaper on his seat and the socks to be darned in his lap.

These are some of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers displayed in the Reading Public Museum as part of a Rockwell/N.C. Wyeth exhibit.

MARY ELLEN WRIGHT | Staff

I spent a lot of time in the final rooms of the exhibit, poring over the Saturday Evening Post covers Rockwell had designed, which run from the 1910s to the 1960s. I could see the evolution of Rockwell’s design style, along with the evolution of social norms and popular culture, throughout those decades.

Plus, it’s fascinating to see the famous names whose writing was included in those magazine editions, from novelist Edith Wharton to “Frankenstein” star Boris Karloff, and profiles of cultural and political figures from gossip columnist Hedda Hopper to Italian strongman Benito Mussolini to entertainer Jack Benny.

“Should Husbands be Baby Sitters?” asks a 1947 cover, featuring a Rockwell painting of a family riding in the family car, bubblegum-chewing kids and a dog hanging out the window.

These are some of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers displayed in the Reading Public Museum as part of a Rockwell/N.C. Wyeth exhibit.

MARY ELLEN WRIGHT | Staff

Those covers — featuring families greeting soldiers home from wars or embracing car culture, and portraits of presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Kennedy — span my grandparents’ lives, my parents’ lives and my own early years in the 1950s and ’60s. Rockwell always captured the Zeitgeist amid his sentimental portraits of everyday American life.

Rockwell’s paintings on these covers are, by turns, whimsical and serious: a little girl showing off her missing tooth on one magazine cover, and a diverse tableau of international figures of diverse races, creeds and nationalities, with the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” printed on another.

The arboretum around the Reading Public Museum is a great place for an autumn stroll on Oct. 21, 2026. Scupltures greet visitors along the path.

MARY ELLEN WRIGHT | Staff

And, of course, I spotted my familial figures again in “Sunday Morning,” gracing the cover of a May 1959 edition of the magazine that contained “A Warning to Young Men” by CBS correspondent Eric Severeid. It was great to see these “old friends” again, while learning so many new things about two familiar, talented artists.

IF YOU GO

• What: “Rockwell/ Wyeth: Icons of Americana” exhibit. The exhibit was curated and organized by the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, Rhode Island, and the American Illustrators Gallery in New York City.

• Where: Second floor galleries, Reading Public Museum, 500 Museum Road, Reading.

• When: The exhibit runs through Jan. 3. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.

• Admission: $6-$14; small children free.

• Additional attractions: The Neag Planetarium is next door to the museum, and offers rotating shows each day. Admission $6-$9, with small children free. The museum contains other art exhibits, plus natural history displays, including taxidermy animals and an Egyptian mummy. And, if it’s a nice day, be sure to take a walk through the museum’s arboretum on either side of Wyomissing Creek, and check out the sculptures along your path.

• Information: readingpublicmuseum.org.

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Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth paintings in the spotlight in Reading [Unscripted column] | Entertainment

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