Exemplary of Norman Rockwell’s extraordinary storytelling ability, The Peephole graced the cover of the August 30, 1958 issue of The Saturday Evening Post and was gifted from the artist to the publication's editor Peter Elliott Schruth. The painting’s subject of a pitcher winding up is shown from the unconventional vantage point of a knothole in a wooden fence, positioning the viewer as an eager child covertly watching a baseball game.

 

America’s national pastime was an apt motif for Rockwell that featured in such renowned works as Hundredth Year of Baseball (Baseball Player and Umpire), 1939, and Game Called Because of Rain (Tough Call), 1949, both National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York; as well as in The Dugout, 1948, Brooklyn Museum; The Rookie, 1957, Private Collection; and Gramps at the Plate, 1916, Private Collection. The sport and its place in American culture acted as a touchstone from which he could explore universal themes, and in the case of the present work, memories of youthful excitement.

 

 

Speaking to The Peephole’s transportive power, the accompanying text in The Post issue invoked this deeply atmospheric reminiscence:

 

“Oh, to be a boy again—or for that matter a girl—and relive the joy of going to a ball game through a knothole. Most knotholes are gradually made by Mother Nature in her unhurried way, but if she is too slow, a boy can help her along, removing the knot with his trusty jackknife or by giving it a good swat with a stone. As you no doubt recall, this should be done secretly, preferably at night; otherwise the caretaker of the ball grounds may chase the boy with a stick and then nail a piece of tin over the new hole, a darned mean thing to do. Sometimes a knothole is made with a brush… Viewers of this game will note that they get as clear a picture as they do on their TV sets. In color too.”ⁱ

 

Titans of American Storytelling

 

The Peephole comes to auction from the formidable collection of storied television producers Thomas Miller and Robert Boyett, who found an affinity with Rockwell’s virtuosic knack for visual narrative. The legendary couple behind Miller-Boyett Productions developed some of the most influential and iconic sitcoms in television history—from Happy Days to Laverne & Shirley to Full House. The Rockwell pictures that Mr. Boyett and Mr. Miller, who died earlier this year, collected betray a compelling dialogue between three great American storytellers.

 

"In each episode of our television shows, we made sure to have characters make some form of human connection. Rockwell did the very same."
— Robert Boyett

Director of the American Way

 

Typical of his working process for his major compositions, Rockwell used numerous photographs—which he directed as scrupulously as one would a film shoot—for The Peephole. Rockwell then chose specific compositional elements to construct his narrative before beginning to meticulously translate it into paint; he sometimes even kept richly-detailed objects near him for reference, such as a wood slab with a knothole in order to achieve the present work’s visual exactitude. The final work would then be reproduced in The Post, which at that time had a circulation near seven million in the 1950s and 1960s.

 

Given his meticulous method and its cinematic result, it is unsurprising that many of the artist’s most ardent collectors are some of Hollywood’s most prominent directors, including George Lucas and Steven Spielberg—whose robust private holdings of Rockwell’s work were on view in the 2010 exhibition Telling Stories at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

 

Not only testifying to the artist’s role as a compelling storyteller of American life, The Peephole exemplifies Rockwell’s idiosyncratic style which has become a source of inspiration for countless contemporary artists. “When this last half century is explored by the future, a few paintings will continue to communicate with the same immediacy and veracity that they have today,” Thomas S. Buechner, the former director of the Brooklyn Museum, wrote. “I believe that some of Mr. Rockwell’s will be among them.”ⁱⁱ

"[Rockwell is a] masterful storyteller who could distill a narrative into a single frame."
— Virginia Mecklenberg

Echoes of Surrealism

 

The negotiation between the seen and the unseen—as implied by the peephole—was a leitmotif during the mid-20^th century, often found in Surrealist works and exhibition design. Magritte famously depicted a peephole in his 1932-1935 masterpiece The Eye, Art Institute of Chicago. A decade later in 1942, architect and sculptor Frederick Kiesler was selected to design Peggy Guggenheim’s seminal Art of This Century Gallery in New York, and one aspect of his innovative approach involved installing a spiral ship’s wheel that rotated the contents of Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise—which only became visible to viewers by looking through a peephole. Duchamp would go on to take this idea as a central component for his last masterpiece, Étant donnés, 1946-1966, Philadelphia Museum of Art, a three-dimensional environmental assemblage inviting the viewer to look through two small peepholes carved into a solid wooden door at a vignette which, like The Peephole, holds us at a distance, allowing us only a glimpse of the tableau we’re meant to be observing.

 

The motif extended beyond the confines of European modernism, taking root in American culture during the 1940s and 1950s, becoming a recurring theme in a range of 20^th century visual media, from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece Rear Window to Roy Lichtenstein’s I Can See the Whole Room...and There's Nobody in It!, 1961. In the latter, the perspective is flipped: a man looks through a hole in a door into the room the viewer is in, positioning us not as observer but instead as observee. What fascinated as diverse a group as Rockwell, Duchamp, and Lichtenstein about peepholes was its interrogation not only of what we see but how we see it.

 

This emphasis on looking is, at its core, a metaphor for the experience of viewing art. Though a painting can surely feel transportive—as The Peephole does in positioning us as an eager child secretly watching a baseball game through a knothole—the viewer is still unable to truly access the representation, and the canvas acts as a physical barrier itself. Just as a child would try to piece together a baseball game with this limited field of vision by listening to referee calls or watching the infielders’ actions, we attempt to understand a painting by looking around a composition for contextual hints. Reaching pop culture, Surrealism, Pop Art, and beyond, this investigation of perception situates Rockwell’s work within one of the most significant concerns of modernism and postmodernism.

 

 

Through the Peephole

 

Through Rockwell’s signature use of trompe l'oeil, The Peephole takes its place in a rich history of illusionism from Baroque art to Surrealism. Indeed, the paintwork is so convincing that when The Post’s Leonard Wexler transported the painting to the studio for Rockwell to incorporate a final change, he got a glimpse of the artist’s source, a small wooden board with a hole in it, and asserted that “the painting looked more like wood than the wood did.”ⁱⁱⁱ Rockwell was incredibly meticulous and specific about his use of material which furthered this optical illusion: The Peephole was executed on panel, which he used for relatively few works and was often a reference to wooden subject matter itself—such as the hardwood floors in Cheerleaders, 1952, Private Collection. The blurred division between image and reality is further called into question by Rockwell’s insertion of actual metal nails into the picture plane, oscillating The Peephole between representation and object, painting and assemblage.

"[Rockewell’s] things are so universal that he would be appreciated everywhere."
— George Grosz

ⁱ The Saturday Evening Post, p. 3.
ⁱⁱ Thomas S. Buechner, The Norman Rockwell Album, New York, 1961, p. 128.
ⁱⁱⁱ Leonard Wexler, quoted in The Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia, August 30, 1958, p. 80.