Rockwell's Golden Rule is illustrated in this incredible painting and indeed 'do as you would be done by' is our own golden rule at Persephone. There is a fascinating little video here where Rockwell himself describes how he came to do the painting, the models he used (wonderfully, the model for the rabbi was actually a Catholic!) and why he did it. With Easter upon us and so many millions of people having so many different beliefs, 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' should be – and is – our everyday mantra.

'New Kids in the Neighbourhood' 1967 is one of Rockwell's most famous paintings and rightly so. Here is a talk by the curators of the Norman Rockwell Museum which explains a little bit more about its context.

The Norman Rockwell Vermont paintings were so interesting that we are also devoting this week to his work, and the theme is racial harmony. 'The Problem We All Live With' appeared in Look magazine in 1964. It is harrowing and unbelievable and haunting and yet to a racist  (but one can say with confidence that not one Persephone reader would be part of this horrible group) it would mean something completely different. 'After the work was published, Rockwell received "sacks of disapproving mail", one example accusing him of being a "traitor to the white race"' (more on Wikipedia here).

This is Rockwell's 'The Homecoming' 1945. We cannot begin to imagine how Dorothy Canfield Fisher felt about this painting – delighted of course at all the soldiers coming home. But desperate about her own son James 'Jimmy' Fisher. The fact that he was a war hero is small comfort for a mother, although he was extraordinarily brave and unselfish and that would have been some consolation for her. Read about Dr Jimmy as he liked to be known here and even watch the film made about the heroic raid to rescue 500 American prisoners, it's called The Great Raid. Nowhere though will you see a mention of the fact that Dr Fisher's mother was one of America's best-known novelists. Except here at Find a Grave where there is a poignant picture of Jimmy standing godfather to a baby he delivered just a few days before he died in the raid and the site gives the names of his parents. But here, in this lengthy description of the extraordinarily successful and heroic raid, there is no mention of Jimmy Fisher. We are remembering him and his mother. (His parents, btw, sponsored two Filipino medical students to come to America to study, and they sponsored a medical facility in the village near where the raid happened. When we publish The Deepening Stream this autumn Persephone readers will have an even fuller picture of this admirable and brilliant woman: the novel describes the Fishers going to France in 1915 in order to help their French friends; 'Jimmy' would have been 2 and he was 5 when he and his elder sister came back to Vermont. He had a quarter century of life before he was killed in January 1945.)

 Norman Rockwell drew John Fisher and Dorothy Canfield Fisher and the latter wrote the preface to a book of his paintings published in 1945. The New York Times reviewed a reissue of the book here and made some interesting comments about the Rockwell style, for example 'the question arises, Is this social history? In a sense it is, but mainly as an exercise in nostalgia'. And: 'as a craftsman, Rockwell early locked himself into the tight, frozen, superphotographic technique that be came the hallmark of his work. We see the immediate scene, but no more, the freshness of his ideas often at war with the literalness of his style, his paintings playful but in a studied way that robs them of spontaneity.'

This is a rather sad Vermont Norman Rockwell. 'The Gossips' appeared on the front of the Saturday Evening Post on March 6th 1948. 'Someone had spread a rumour about Rockwell and he painted a cover about it. As he worked on the project, Rockwell worried that his friends and neighbours might be offended, so he included his wife and himself. Mary Rockwell is second and third in the third row. In the grey felt hat in the bottom row is the artist himself. The woman at the end is the one at the beginning who started the rumour, and Rockwell appears to be giving her a piece of his mind. Apparently, the neighbour who started the rumour in real life never spoke to Rockwell again' (here).

The Homecoming Christmas 1948 (an incredibly famous painting in America, less so in the UK) shows Rockwell's family and some of his Vermont neighbours - more details here.