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Norman Rockwell didn’t invent Thanksgiving, but there are few things more American than his art. He put scenes from the lives of ordinary Americans on covers of The Saturday Evening Post, once the most widely circulated magazine in the U.S., and painted portraits of American presidents. Today, his paintings hang in the White House and many museums.
Seven Rockwell oil paintings are also on display at GE Lighting’s Nela Park historical campus in East Cleveland, Ohio. GE’s Edison Light Works commissioned the paintings, which range in style from Dutch masters to impressionism, for a 1920s advertising campaign.
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What a Difference Light Makes - 1925. Top image: Good Housekeeping - 1925
These are no ordinary Rockwells. They captured Americans discovering the electric light and putting it in their homes. Michael J. P. Collins, former president of the Rockwell Society of America, wrote that the “Light Campaign marked a major turning point in [Rockwell’s] career. It required something more of him than mere talent: to capture the profound change which the new electric light brought to American life, he had to explore its impact on a whole range of traditional family activities.”
GE founder Thomas Edison had invented the first practical incandescent light bulb four decades earlier at the Menlo Park Laboratory in NewJersey. It used a carbonized bamboo filament and lasted 600 hours. (Things have changed since. Users can control GE’s new Link LED light bulb, which it makes in partnership with Quirky, from their smartphones. Its lifetime is more than 22 years.)
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All Right with the Light – 1921
GE used Rockwell’s Light Campaign series as advertising art in magazines like the Post, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and as calendar art. “In the 1920s and 1930s, most of the light bulb dealers were electrical shops that specialized in all kinds of appliances and lighting fixtures,” says Mary Beth Gotti, who manages GE’s Lighting Institute in Ohio. “GE provided them with merchandising materials including signs, display stands, posters, blotters – and calendars. These calendars featured the works of many noted artists, including Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish.”
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Old Man Playing Solitaire - 1921
GE’s Rockwell collection was initially twice its present size, but the company had given some of the paintings away as retirement gifts to executives.
The practice ended in the 1960s. Today, everyone can enjoy online the company of another artist: Jeff Goldblum.
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Grandpa’s Treasure Chest - 1920
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What a Protection Electric Light is - 1925
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And The Symbol of Welcome is Light - 1920
Image credits: GE Lighting Institute