COFFS COAST ARTWORKS
NORMAN ROCKWELL AMERICAN FOLK ARTIST
Homage to his Art - as entered in the CHCAG "Fabulous Fakes" Exhibition 2020
PORTRAIT OF BING CROSBY AS DOC BOONE IN “STAGECOACH”
by Gary Kernick Hutchinson 2020
after NORMAN ROCKWELL 1966
Stagecoach is a 1966 American film, directed by Gordon Douglas between July and September 1965, as a color remake of the Academy Award-winning John Ford 1939 classic black-and-white western Stagecoach.
An alcoholic doctor, Doc Boone is played by Bing Crosby in one of his last Feature Length Movie roles.
Crosby projects eloquently the jaded worldliness of a down-and-outer who still has not lost all self-respect. Much humor evolves from his running gag with Red Buttons, the preacher-dressed and mannered liquor salesman played earlier by the late Donald Meek.
Also in the cast, playing their sole credited film roles, were two artists, 15th-billed David Humphreys Miller, a 47-year-old western historian who specialized in the culture of the northern Plains Indians and created, among his works, 72 portraits of the survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and 20th-billed NORMAN ROCKWELL, 71 years old, who was engaged to be on the set in order to paint the portraits of the stars and assigned the small role of a town poker player nicknamed Busted Flush.
The film's closing-credits sequence features the full-screen inscription, THE CAST AS PAINTED BY NORMAN ROCKWELL, followed by images of each of the ten leading players in the same order as in the opening credits. The portraits were also used in the poster for the film.
Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was an American painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades.
Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his works are either in public collections, or have been destroyed in fire or other misfortunes. Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate more than 40 books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as painting the portraits for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as those of foreign figures, including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. His portrait subjects included Judy Garland. One of his last portraits was of Colonel Sanders in 1973.
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 17 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.
Norman Rockwell's original portrait of Bing Crosby as Doc Boone
