Footnotes

Provenance
Marion West Higgins (1915-1991), New Jersey.
Judy Goffman American Paintings, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, consigned from the above, 1981.
American Illustrators Gallery, New York, transferred from the above.
John C. Cushman III (1941-2023), Los Angeles, acquired from the above, September 1992.
Sale, Coeur D'Alene Art Auction, Reno, Nevada, July 27, 2013, lot 170.
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale.

Exhibited
Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art, Norman Rockwell, February 20-March 31, 1992, pp. 81, 124, no. 41, illustrated, and elsewhere.

Literature
"Scouts and Scouting," Oakland Tribune, Oakland, California, November 30, 1941, vol. CXXXV, no. 153, p. 50.
"Artist Dramatizes Spirit of Youth in Boy Scout Calendars," Sterling Daily Gazette, Sterling, Illinois, December 15, 1941, no. 151, p. 2.
"New Boy Scout Calendar," Warren Times-Mirror, Warren, Pennsylvania, December 20, 1941, vol. 2, no. 236, p. 3, illustrated.
"Cashmore Presents Calendars to Boy Scouts," Brooklyn Eagle, New York, December 21, 1941, no. 353, p. 2.
"Scout Calendars Distributed," Auburn Journal, Auburn, California, December 29, 1941, vol. 70, no. 9, p. 1.
"A Scout is Loyal," The Daily Notes, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, December 31, 1941, p. 6, illustrated.
"Boy Scout Notes," The Clinton Eye, Clinton, Missouri, January 8, 1942, vol. 57, no. 17, p. 4.
"Scout Calendars Being Distributed," The North Platte Telegraph, North Platte, Nebraska, January 9, 1942, vol. LXIII, no. 8, p. 6.
Boys' Life, February 1942, vol. XXXII, no. 2, p. 41, illustrated on the front cover.
"Financial Drive for Boy Scouts Will Start in a Few Days," The Yukon Oklahoma Sun, Yukon, Oklahoma, February 12, 1942, vol, XLVIII, no. 17, p. 5, illustrated.
"A Scout is Loyal," The Morning Union, Grass Valley, California, February 14, 1942, vol. LXXVIII, no. 23,853, p. 6, illustrated.
The Official Boy Scout Calendar, Brown & Bigelow, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1942, illustrated.
W. Hillcourt, Norman Rockwell's World of Scouting, New York, 1977, pp. 148-49, illustrated.
D. Stoltz, M. Stoltz, The Advertising World of Norman Rockwell, New York, 1985, pp. 30-32, illustrated.
L.N. Moffatt, Norman Rockwell: A Definitive Catalogue, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1986, vol. I, p. 276, no. A62, pl. 29, illustrated.
B. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America, Chicago, 2008, pp. 67-68, 375, fig. 2.1, illustrated.
"Coeur d'Alene Art Auction: Peppermill Resort Spa Casino, July 26-27," Southwest Art, Cincinnati, July 2013, vol. 43, no. 2, p. 34, illustrated.

P indicates that this is a Premium Lot. If you wish to bid on this lot, please refer to the printed catalogue or Auction Information for bidding instructions.

We are grateful for Jennifer A. Greenhill's assistance with the cataloguing of this work and for preparing the following essay.

The Boy Scouts of America launched the artistic career of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), who would go on to become the most visible and celebrated illustrator in the United States. The teenaged art student first saw his artwork published in C. H. Claudy's 1912 "Tell Me Why" Stories.¹ But it was the commissions Rockwell received the same year to illustrate The Boy Scout's Hike Book and stories in Boys' Life: The Boy Scouts' Magazine that laid the groundwork for themes that would preoccupy him for years to come.² Patriotism, tradition, and the transition from boyhood to manhood are all in play in A Scout is Loyal, which illustrates the second point of Scout Law: loyalty "to all to whom loyalty is due, his Scout leader, his home, and parents and country."³

Rockwell's iconography prioritizes loyalty to country. The young man—still boyish but on the cusp of adulthood—lifts his gaze to the American flag that flutters in from the upper left corner. A bald eagle soars over the Scout's shoulder and Presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington stand behind, as if backing up the boy as paternal supporters as much as elder statesmen or national symbols. Rockwell renders this section of the composition in muted blue-gray tones, indicating that it should be understood as a symbolic realm—a technique he employed frequently to depict imaginative figment and non-material ideals. He used a related strategy in the version of A Scout is Loyal that the artist painted a decade earlier, with the Scout, this time in profile, silhouetted against an evanescent Washington who points the way forward with an eagle in flight below. Rockwell made the later version in a dramatically different wartime context. Painted in 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, the composition appeared on Brown & Bigelow's 1942 Boy Scout calendar and on the February 1942 cover of Boys' Life—just after the United States entered the conflict, in December 1941.⁴

In "Strong—For America," an article within the Boys' Life issue fronted by Rockwell's cover image, Chief Scout Executive James E. West called readers to attention: "Scouts, we have taken up the sword in defense of the American way of life and all that is traditionally worthwhile to us. We are all in the battle!"⁵ Rockwell could not have predicted the bombing of Pearl Harbor that precipitated U.S. entry into the war when he painted A Scout is Loyal in 1940, but his eagle on the attack, with talons splayed, fits the battle-ready sentiments expressed by West. Although the organization insisted that scouting was "not military in thought, form, or spirit" and took pains in the early forties to distance troop drills from "military tactics," it also trumpeted the number of former Scouts in the Armed Forces, presenting BSA training as "the most complete" preparation for military service.⁶ The National Rededication Campaign of 1938 had invited Scouts to clasp hands with other youth organizations in support of the nation's founding principles against Fascist violence abroad. After December 1941, the Scouts began to play an active role on the home front by going door to door to collect over 10,316,407 pounds of metal, for example, and other materials crucial to success on the front lines.⁷ "When the Scouts were not collecting things," explains historian Mischa Honeck, "they were handing out pamphlets, distributing government posters, planting Victory gardens, working on farms, training in first aid and practicing air raid drills."⁸ This was the "Good Turn" of Scouting—the expectation that Scouts "help other people at all times"—mobilized to meet the needs of the global emergency.⁹

How might Rockwell's picture have struck viewers in 1942 who had already taken a pamphlet from a Scout at the door or maybe placed some useful material into his receiving hands? Rockwell's figure in A Scout is Loyal stands with arms outstretched, with hat in his right hand and his left palm open, as if on the receiving end of something—though the artist suggests that something may be more spiritual than material. The boy, having reached the summit of his hike, stands taller than the gleaming white church we spy in the distance, its tall steeple pointing heavenward. Does Rockwell want us to see the boy's ascent as some sort of divine pilgrimage? Could we mistake the young man illuminated by sunlight for a devout pilgrim in the presence of divinity shining down from on high? Old Master Transfiguration imagery seems to have provided a template for Rockwell, who reworked for a U.S. national context the traditional iconography of Christ poised on the mountaintop and met by Moses and Elijah aloft in the clouds—a role now played by Washington and Lincoln, whom the artist rendered as "cloudy visions."¹⁰ Thus did Rockwell fold into his portrayal of Scout loyalty another fundamental tenet of Scout law, reverence: "He is reverent toward God. He is faithful in his religious duties, and respects the convictions of others in matters of custom and religion."¹¹ Religious tolerance took on new meaning in the context of Nazi Germany's vicious persecution of the Jewish population, which, as Honeck points out, West used in 1939 "as an opportunity to remind America's Boy Scouts that their nation had a providential role to play."¹² In Rockwell's hands, the Scout becomes a Savior figure on a patriotic and providential mission.

Perhaps Rockwell's most famous nod to Old Master religious precedent is his Rosie the Riveter (1943), which adopts the pose of the prophet Isaiah from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel to champion women's robust contributions to the war effort.¹³ As we find in A Scout is Loyal, an American flag plays a key compositional role in Rosie, this time as backdrop to the noble beauty, whose red hair and socks, blue shirt, and denim overalls match the patriotic color scheme. The halo above Rosie's head announces the divinity of the riveter who is otherwise down to earth, on her lunch break, sandwich in hand. The earlier painting, A Scout is Loyal, more fully infuses spirituality into the scene, and in some surprisingly subtle ways.

Note how Rockwell angles the eagle's wing and the President's billowing cloak on the same diagonal, just above the boy's right hand. This almost seems to visually lift the boy's arm, give it some elevation and extension. This effect, like the visual rhyme between the eagle's splayed feathers and the splayed fingers of the boy's left hand, make the Scout appear as though he, too, may be capable of flight. Does Rockwell want us to see his brightly illuminated figure with arms outstretched as some sort of angel? Would the readers of Boys' Life in February 1942 have been prompted by the image to think about aviation and the central role played by aerial fighters in the conflict overseas? The BSA launched the Air Scouts right at this time for boys interested in aviation, a major theme of almost every issue of the magazine during this period.¹⁴

Rockwell would allude to the violence wrought on the ground from aerial bombings in Freedom from Fear (1943) one of the paintings he made to visualize the four fundamental freedoms President Franklin D. Roosevelt enumerated in his 1941 State of the Union address.¹⁵ The patriarch who participates in the evening ritual of tucking the children into bed has been reading about "bombings" and "horror" in the newspaper he carries with him. These concerns appear to weigh down the man who bends his head forward to look lovingly on his children, who are safe in bed, their bodies protected from harm and even from view. Rockwell pictures innocence permitted to sleep through the violence of war—children permitted to dream. The reality of the global conflict enters their space only indirectly—through a newspaper headline, whose angle suggests a topsy-turvy upside-down world. The doll on the floor behind the parents, alone and exposed, is Rockwell's way of alluding to the vulnerability of the children "hit" by the "bombings" announced in the newspaper. As he recounted later in his 1960 autobiography, he made the painting while London was under attack and based it "on a rather smug idea" that American children were secure while those in the U.K. might be "killed in the night."¹⁶

In this work and the other paintings that make up The Four Freedoms, Rockwell put his finger on the pulse of American home front culture. Americans did not want to see terrifying images, reasoned the Office of War Information and the War Advertising Council. They wanted to dream about a brighter and more secure future at war's end. They wanted to minimize war's intrusion by thinking in terms of continuities and how the traditions of the past would live on through future generations. In the context of war, familiar American traditions, like the annual Thanksgiving meal, and quiet daily rituals, like tucking the children into bed, took on new meaning. Rockwell excelled at picturing these traditions and rituals when other artists floundered. J. C. Leyendecker, for example, Rockwell's early mentor and only true rival at the Saturday Evening Post, struggled in the early 1940s to embody the popular mood in his cover designs. With the editorial change that came at the Post in 1942, Leyendecker was let go, despite over four decades of service. With Leyendecker's departure—and with him, the New Year's Baby he had painted to bring in the New Year every January since 1906—Rockwell became the Post's lead cover artist.¹⁷

Indeed, it was in this period that Rockwell became the "Norman Rockwell" we know today. In the early 1940s, the artist began to think more expansively, with more involved storylines and intricate figural arrangements set in increasingly complex visual environments. The detail-rich, believable worlds Rockwell created in these cover pictures (along with his optimistic tone—there from the start) served a very specific cultural purpose during the war years and would lay the foundation for his most memorable works from the 1950s, such as Saying Grace (1951), Breaking Home Ties (1954), and After the Prom (1957). The works that have endured as cultural touchstones to remember, revisit, and revise (sometimes via parody and related forms of citation) come largely from this fertile period in his production, the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁸

Rockwell painted A Scout is Loyal during this fertile period and at a particularly pivotal moment in his career, just as he was solidifying his vision of what I have elsewhere described as home front futurity.¹⁹ That Scout looking off into the distance toward the light and the American flag is also looking toward the future. This is the boy safe in bed grown up and poised to take on adult responsibilities. The religious undertones of the iconography suggest that this may include a sacrifice for the greater good of the nation—a dark message that Rockwell would only intimate. The Scout is a bridge between the protected children in Freedom from Fear and the Private Willie Gillis, the recurring character Rockwell initiated on the Post's cover beginning in October 1941. In many ways, Willie's activities are mundane: he receives a care package, flirts during a blackout, attends a church service. But the scrawny boy-man is also a soldier, who prompted many Post readers to think about their own boys who had left home to fight. Some pointed to the depth of feeling they found in some of these covers, such as the image of Willie in church—"a stirring picture" that inspired one reader to request more information about the real Willie Gillis, who, she wrote, "must be someBODY, not just SOMEbody."²⁰

World War II was the period when the artist came into his own as chief visualizer of traditional American values—a reputation that endures to this day. Rockwell's greatest wish was "to please people," as he said repeatedly.²¹ Perhaps this is one reason why these works remain cultural icons that can be endlessly updated. In 2018, the photographer Emily Shur remade the iconic paintings of The Four Freedoms as an homage and "reimagining of what they would look like if they were made today."²² For the 2021 Pageant of the Masters—a Laguna Beach (California) tradition since the 1930s, which stages live-action reproductions of works of art—the Four Freedoms were projected to reinforce the message of national resiliency during the ongoing pandemic. Rockwell's Boy Scout pictures have not received the same critical attention as these landmark works of the early 1940s, but they reached a wide audience and were extremely popular. According to Laurie Norton Moffatt, 1947 market studies identified Rockwell's Boy Scout calendars as top sellers, nationally.²³ The artist's association with the Boy Scouts of America began in 1912 and ended in 1976—exceeding the length of time he worked for the Saturday Evening Post (1916-1963). A Scout is Loyal is thus significant in Rockwell's body of work and American history for multiple reasons. It offers a window into the youth organization's cultural significance during an earth-shifting moment in world history. And it attests to Rockwell's career-long commitment to visualizing the Boy Scouts of America in the best possible light.<sup>24

1</sup> C. H. Claudy, "Tell Me Why" Stories (New York: McBride, Nast & Company, 1912).
² Edward Cave, The Boy Scout's Hike Book: The First of a Series of Handy Volumes of Information and Inspiration (Garden City and New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913); The artist's first illustrations for the magazine appeared in Stanley Snow, "Partners," Boys' Life 2: 2 (January 1913): 2-4, 22-23. Deborah Solomon, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (New York: Picador, 2014), 54, points out that "the magazine's circulation was modest then (about sixty thousand)."
³ "The Scout Law" in Boy Scouts of America, Handbook for Boys (New York: Boy Scouts of America, 1945), 33-36, quotation at 33.
⁴ Brown & Bigelow required a two-year lead time for Rockwell's calendar designs, which he began making annually in the 1920s. For more on this arrangement, see William Hillcourt, "Fifty-Two Years of Boy Scout Calendars" in Norman Rockwell's World of Scouting (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977), 90-125.
⁵ James E. West, "Strong—For America," Boys' Life 32: 2 (February 1942): 10-11, 48-49, quotation at 10.
⁶ The first two quotations—from the Thirty-Third Annual Report, Boys Scouts of America, 1942—appear in Harold P. Levy, Building a Popular Movement: A Case Study of the Public Relations of the Boy Scouts of America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1944), 87. For the last quotation and the early 1940s slogan, "One Fourth of America's Armed Forces...Scout Trained," see Mischa Honeck, Our Frontier is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 190.
⁷ West, "Strong—For America," 11.
⁸ Honeck, Our Frontier is the World, 189.
⁹ These words, within the Scout Oath, appeared next to Rockwell's picture on the February 1942 cover of Boys' Life. On "The Good Turn" as a distinctive feature of Scouting, see William D. Murray, The History of the Boy Scouts of America (New York: Boy Scouts of America, 1937), 477-498.
¹⁰ In his 1960 autobiography, Rockwell used the terms "cloudy vision of George Washington" to describe another Boy Scout calendar image. See Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator, the definitive edition, edited by Abigail Rockwell (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 2019), 407.
¹¹ "The Scout Law" in Boy Scouts of America, Handbook for Boys, 33-36, quotation at 36.
¹² Honeck, Our Frontier is the World, 191. For a period view of the role of religion in the BSA, see Murray, "Scouting and Religion" in The History of the Boy Scouts of America, 499-530.
¹³ See "I Like To Please People," Time (June 21, 1943): 41-42, quotation at 41.
¹⁴ Levy, Building a Popular Movement, 101.
¹⁵ See Maureen Hart Hennessey, "Four Freedoms" in Maureen Hart Hennessey and Anne Knutson, eds., Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999), 102. For a broader consideration, see Stephanie Haboush Plunkett and James J. Kimble, eds., Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, & The Four Freedoms (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 2018).
¹⁶ Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator (1960; repr., New York: Ballantine, 1972), 364.
¹⁷ I make this case and say more about Leyendecker, period-specific approaches to propaganda, and more in Jennifer A. Greenhill, "How To Make It as a Mainstream Magazine Illustrator, or J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell Go To War," Winterthur Portfolio 52: 4 (Winter 2018): 209-252.
¹⁸ This paragraph is drawn from my "How to Make It as a Mainstream Magazine Illustrator," 211.
¹⁹ See my "How to Make It as a Mainstream Magazine Illustrator," 231.
²⁰ Letter from Mrs. H. W. Smith, Tampa, FL, June 28, 1943, "Willie Gillis" folder, Norman Rockwell Museum Archives. This sentence is drawn from my "How to Make It as a Mainstream Magazine Illustrator," 237.
²¹ "I Like to Please People," 41-42.
²² Emily Shur, quoted in Holly Stuart Hughes, "Emily Shur on Reverse Engineering Norman Rockwell," Photo District News (February 7, 2019): https://pdnonline.com/features/photographer-interviews/emily-shur-on-reverse- engineering-norman-rockwell/ Shur collaborated with internationally renowned artist Hank Willis Thomas on this project for For Freedoms, an organization Thomas leads with Eric Gottesman to increase "creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action" through art. See https://forfreedoms.org
²³ Laurie Norton Moffatt, Norman Rockwell: A Definitive Catalogue, vol. 1 (Hanover and London: The University Press of New England, 1986), 270.
²⁴ See Arthur L. Guptill, Norman Rockwell, Illustrator (New York: Watson-Guptill/Ballantine, 1946), 137 on the "super-perfection" of the Scouts in Rockwell's Boy Scout paintings.