This early version of Freedom of Speech was, like the rest, derived more or less from Rockwell's own experiences in his recently-adopted home town in Vermont, a small village whose landscapes, homes, buildings and citizens would serve as raw materials for many of his paintings in the future. Here he showed an Arlington, Vermont, town meeting-- the bedrock event of American participatory democracy, in which elected officials stood or sat on a stage and presented their proposals to their fellow citizens, who were free to respond, with questions, speeches, or comments, before voting. This early version of the painting was but one of four attempts, before the artist finally had the crucial insight-- that the viewer should be in the audience, seated on one of the hard benches, looking back at a speaker, a citizen among citizens.

The early version of Freedom of Worship was even more unsuccessful. Here the unlikely assemblage of different races and religions required a leap of credulity on the part of the viewer, and moreover Rockwell had to depend upon racial and religious stereotypes in order to get his point across-- the Negro was obscured, but the Jew had the caricatured hook-nose and expanded balding head that appeared in everything from Yiddish theatre to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. On top of it, there was no evidence that these people might be discussing anything more fractious than the weather! Rockwell knew it was all wrong, and he solved the problem by going in exactly the opposite direction, moving to generality and abstraction, assembling faces and religions in the indeterminate floating space of a painting.

Response and Transformation

Rockwell had always intended that his pieces serve the war cause in a direct and propagandistic way. And they did: they appeared as banners, posters, and features in huge public exhibitions, public events, autograph events, and even a tour by the Arlington, Vermont, residents who'd served as models.

The Four Freedoms weren't the only Rockwell illustrations to be transformed into posters. The marvelously detailed urban imagery of The Homecoming also served the purpose.

By the end of 1943, Rockwell's paintings had become so iconic, so immediately recognizable, that they could stand in for American identity and purpose, both at home and abroad. Here, on the front facade of a downtown movie theatre, they loom above the pedestrians, visible from far down the block.

Rockwell's models, too, appeared in promotions, where their recognizable faces and bodies gave credence to the pictures, returned the images to their specificity, and made the people in them celebrities, mobbed by autograph seekers and well-wishers.

Here the dominant face in "Freedom of Worship" has brought her iconic New England baked bean casserole to share-- in a photo-op.