SHELBURNE, VT.- Shelburne Museum is presenting Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont, on view June 20 through October 25, 2026. The exhibition examines how America’s beloved illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) shaped an enduring vision of Vermont—and, by extension, the nation, during his formative years living and working in Arlington, Vermont, from 1939 to 1953.


Installation view of Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont.

“Rockwell’s Vermont was both a real place and a carefully constructed ideal,” said Carolyn Bauer, the Marna and Chuck Davis Curator of American Art at Shelburne Museum and curator of the exhibition. “By situating his work within the social, artistic, and literary context of Arlington, this exhibition reveals how Rockwell used place to articulate enduring American values, community, self-reliance, and moral conviction at a moment when the nation desperately needed reassurance.”


Installation view of Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont.

Created during a period marked by the Great Depression and World War II, Rockwell’s Vermont works offered Americans a reassuring image of national life: orderly, resilient, and grounded in shared values. Through paintings and illustrations, Rockwell portrayed not merely scenes of New England life, but a deeply rooted ethos, one in which democratic community, moral clarity, and quiet individualism flourished. As noted in The Atlantic in 1933, Vermonters were “all rare birds,” unwilling to conform to any easy type. Their independence of mind, combined with the state’s pastoral landscape—"red barns, old mills, lovely valleys,” as Arlington-writer Charles Edward Crane (1884–1960) admired—offered a haven for artists seeking a life apart from the anxious materialism of America’s cities. As Arlington-based author Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958) wrote, “Most Americans are afraid of poverty or social inferiority or change or politics...but it is true [that in Vermont] a whole stateful of people have no ground for apprehension.”


Gene Pelham, Portrait of Norman Rockwell, 1950. Oil on canvas, 41 3/4.x 32 1/2 in. Norman Rockwell Museum, Gift of The Collins Family. NRM.2010.01.

The exhibition situates Rockwell’s Vermont years within a broader creative milieu, highlighting the Arlington artist circle that included Mead Schaeffer (1898–1980), John Atherton (1900–1952), and Gene Pelham (1909–2004), all informally enticed to Arlington, Vermont. Together, they helped define a cultural moment in which Vermont was mythologized as democracy’s granite-strong refuge. Even Rockwell’s orchestrated friendship with Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860–1961) was part of a wider crafting of New England as both authentic and marketable—where artists and audiences alike found a form of moral anchorage.

Featuring the newly acquired Rockwell paintings to Shelburne Museum celebrating Vermont’s granite industry, long regarded as the state’s “backbone,” Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont examines not only the imagery but the careful mythmaking that made Vermont central to Rockwell’s enduring vision of America. In Arlington, far from the instability of New York, where, as a young man, he had found only transience and hardship, Rockwell discovered a community willing to stand still long enough to be documented: resilient, unpretentious, and, like the landscape itself, remarkably enduring.


Norman Rockwell, Kneeling Girl, 1955. Oil on canvas, 33 3/8 x 31 1/8 in. Collection of Shelburne Museum, gift of Polycor and Rock of Ages Corporation. 2024-12.3. Photography by Andy Duback.

PUBLICATION

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated 152-page catalogue Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont. The catalogue includes essays by the curator of the exhibition, Carolyn Bauer, the Marna and Chuck Davis Curator of American Art at Shelburne Museum; and by Thomas Denenberg, the John Wilmerding Director & CEO at Shelburne Museum; and Alexander Nemerov, the Carl and Marilynn Thoma, Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. This book is available in the Shelburne Museum Shop.

SPECIAL EVENT

Rockwell Day
Saturday, September 26, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Spend the day celebrating the legacy of Norman Rockwell, America’s beloved illustrator. Join us for scholar talks, gallery tours, Rockwell-inspired artmaking, and a Rockwell model reunion!


Aldo Merusi, Norman Rockwell with Mead Schaeffer, John Atherton and Peter Rockwell, date unknown. Silver gelatin print, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust, Studio Collection. ST.1976.20032.178.241. Artwork Approved by the Norman Rockwell Family Agency.

Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont is made possible by the generous support of the Judith and James Pizzagalli American Paintings Endowment, Donna and Marvin Schwartz, Todd R. Lockwood, the Frelinghuysen Foundation, the M&T Charitable Foundation, and Maplefields.

Shelburne Museum exhibitions are also generously supported by Shelburne Museum members and donors to the museum’s Annual Fund.


Norman Rockwell, The Craftsman, 1963. Oil on canvas, 47 1/4 x 38 1/4 in. Collection of Shelburne Museum, gift of Polycor and Rock of Ages Corporation. 2024-12.1. Photography by Andy Duback.

Shelburne Museum

Founded in 1947 by trailblazing folk art collector Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, is the largest art and history museum in northern New England and Vermont’s foremost public resource for visual art and material culture. The Museum’s 45-acre campus is comprised of 39 buildings including the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education and Webb Gallery featuring important American paintings by Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, John Singleton Copley and many more. Construction is underway for the Perry Center for Native American Art, designed in partnership with Indigenous voices and devoted to the stewardship and exhibition of the Native American art in the museum’s care, scheduled to open in 2027. For more information, please visit shelburnemuseum.org.