Artist: Norman Rockwell
Title: Puppy Love Portfolio
Year created: 1975
Medium: Suite of Four 12-Color Lithographs on Heavy Arches Paper, in Original Heavy Linen Portfolio with Enclosures
Signed by the artist
Edition: 158/200 Pencil-Signed and Numbered Limited Edition
Height (inches): 22
Width (inches): 20
This piece is unframed
Includes a certificate of authenticity
Description of piece:
Norman Rockwell's Puppy Love was produced in 1975 as a limited edition suite of four (4) individually titled original limited edition 12-color lithographs, all held within a special heavy linen portfolio, with additional enclosures.
Limited to only 200 signed and numbered sets, the complete set includes a heavy linen portfolio, bearing the suite's title, Puppy Love, along with the artist's name, "Norman Rockwell." Within, the portfolio holds 3 enclosure sheets and 4 individual artworks, each artwork numbered 158/200 in the lower left margin and each hand-signed, in pencil, by the artist in the lower right margin.
The lithographs— as per the enclosed title and description sheets— were created on papier d'Arches, and pulled at Atelier Ettinger, New York. The suite of lithographs includes the following titled artworks:
Love Pat, Measure of Love, Love at First Sight, and Love's Little Treasures.
Each of the 4 artworks measures a sizable 22" in height x 20" width; the Portfolio, which has a cloth ribbon tie-closure, measures 22-1/4" in height x 21-1/4" width x 1" depth. Norman Rockwell's Puppy Love Portfolio was published by Eleanor Ettinger, Inc., New York, from original images created by Norman Rockwell for the Brown and Bigelow Company.
It is difficult to find the complete Puppy Love Portfolio in such fine condition, with each of the lithographs never having been framed. This highly collectible suite of Norman Rockwell artworks is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity.
Artist bio:
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) artwork captured scenes from American life and culture, skillfully executed with such minute attention to detail and so realistic that they often resembled photographs rather than paintings. During Rockwell's prodigious career he painted over 300 cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. He also is noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America, during which he produced covers for their publication Boys' Life (with which he began his career at age 18), annual calendars, and other illustrations.
Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than four thousand original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell also was commissioned to illustrate more than forty books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts calendars between 1925 and 1976 (Rockwell was a 1939 recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America), were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the Four Seasons illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for seventeen years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. He painted six images for Coca-Cola advertising. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals (including Yankee Doodle Dandy and God Bless the Hills, which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell's œuvre as an illustrator. In 1969, as a tribute to Rockwell's seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth, officials of Brown & Bigelow and the Boy Scouts of America asked Rockwell to pose in Beyond the Easel, the calendar illustration that year.
Rockwell's work was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2001. Rockwell's Breaking Home Ties sold for $15.4 million at a 2006 Sotheby's auction. A twelve-city U.S. tour of Rockwell's works took place in 2008. In 2008, Rockwell was named the official state artist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The 2013 sale of Saying Grace for $46 million established a new record price for Rockwell art. Rockwell's work was exhibited at the Reading Public Museum and the Church History Museum in 2013–2014.