Norman Rockwell, “Breaking Home Ties”, The Saturday Evening Post, September 25, 1954.
I can understand his feeling of letting go of the season of childhood and teen years, in order to let young adults fly the nest.
Rockwell commented on his painting, saying, “I once did a cover showing a father seeing his son off to college. That year my three boys had gone away and I’d had an empty feeling — it took me a while to adjust without them. This poignancy was what I wanted to get across in the picture. But there was humor in it too. I put a funny kind of suit on the boy because he was a ranch boy leaving home for the first time. And his father was holding two hats: one was his beat-up old rancher’s hat and the other the son’s brand-new hat. The boy was carrying a lunch box all done up in pink ribbon. I drew a collie dog with his head on the boy’s lap. I got most of my fan letters about the dog. You see, the father couldn’t show how he felt about the boy’s leaving. The dog did.”
— Norman Rockwell, 1960
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