Sotheby’s American art sale on December 4 will be led by a selection of seven Norman Rockwell paintings offered by the family of Kenneth J. Stuart Sr., the artist’s longtime friend and art editor at the Saturday Evening Post. The group includes several icons of Rockwell’s career: “Saying Grace” (1951), estimated at $15 million to $20 million; “The Gossips” (1948), estimated at $6 million to $9 million; and “Walking to Church” (1953), which is expected to fetch between $3 million and $5 million. The sale will almost certainly break the current record for Rockwell, which was set in 2006 when the painting “Breaking Home Ties” (1954) sold for $13.8 million at Sotheby’s New York, more than doubling the high $6 million estimate.
The seven works together are expected to bring more than $24 million. Rockwell, whose work has been enjoying a new level of respect in recent years, is the subject of a recently published biography by the critic Deborah Solomon entitled American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Kenneth Stuart’s son Jon told ARTINFO that the works had been in his childhood home in Connecticut, where he and his siblings enjoyed living with and looking at them, since 1963, when his father left the Post. For the last 18 years or so, the works were on loan to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and some were occasionally loaned out for other museum shows. Parting with the works is difficult, Jon Stuart says, but family members agreed that a sale was best, considering the size and the maintenance requirements of the paintings. “We had a good run with them,” says Stuart. “We’re all very happy about having had them.”
Sotheby’s has fielded worldwide interest for the works so far, including from Asia. Institutional buyers with deep pockets, like the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, founded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, are likely bidders, experts say.
