Uma Audiência de Um (An Audience of One) - Norman Rockwell

 

Uma Audiência de Um (An Audience of One) - Norman Rockwell
Coleção privada
OST - 66x52 - 1938

Featured in the December 1938 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, An Audience of One beautifuly displays Norman Rockwell’s ability to tell a story through a single image. First owned by fellow artist John Falter, who also painted covers for The Saturday Evening Post, and then by renowned Hollywood television producers Thomas Miller and Robert Boyett, An Audience of One has been admired by prominent storytellers for over 70 years.
An Audience of One accompanied a short story in the magazine chronicling a grandfather surprising his family dressed as Santa Claus. Rockwell showcases two quintessential—yet diametrically converse—reactions to meeting such a monumental figure of childhood imagination. The young boy in front looks up in awe; the child in the back hides behind his mother, slightly afraid of meeting Santa; the woman, holding gifts, acts as a formal divide between these two opposite responses to such an iconic moment of American youth.
To complement this story, Rockwell likely used his wife Mary Rhodes and two older sons Jarvis and Thomas as models for his painting. Rockwell typically used ordinary people from his community in order to tell timeless stories about childhood, the experiences that form us, and the emotions and passions that make us human.
An Audience of One was commissioned by Ladies’ Home Journal to accompany the titular short story by Viola Paradise in which a grandfather dresses up as a fortune-telling Santa Claus in order to surprise his grandsons Nicky and Dicky and daughter-in-law Edna, and—while in character—compel her to reconcile with his son, her estranged husband. He sets up in costume where he is sure to see her, his audience of one, a spendthrift who loves getting her fortune read: her favorite department store, an aspirational site of relative luxury during the tail end of the Great Depression. After he waits two weeks for the family to finally come by, at the climax of the story—the exact moment Rockwell captured—“they came forward, Nick clinging to Edna, Dicky wide-eyed with wonder. Her eyes were searching, as if begging for some word of hope.”i In the end, the grandfather persuades Edna to reunite with her husband.
Nota do blog: Abaixo foto da pintura "An Audience of One" ilustrando o conto publicado no Ladies’ Home Journal em 1938.