Freedom from Want

Freedom from Want, often called The Thanksgiving Picture, is the third of Norman Rockwell's four paintings illustrating the Four Freedoms that President Franklin D. Roosevelt named in his January 1941 State of the Union address. Painted in November 1942, it was published in The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1943. The canvas, 116.2 by 90 centimeters, is in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

What you are looking at

We look down a long dining table from its foot, as if we had just taken the last empty seat. At the far end, framed by a white-curtained window, a white-haired grandmother in an apron lowers an enormous roast turkey on a platter, while the grandfather, in a dark suit, stands behind her ready to carve. Down both sides of the table, family members lean in, laughing and talking. At the lower right a man turns straight toward us, grinning, as if to welcome us in.

The table is set with a white cloth, glass tumblers of water, a bowl of fruit, celery, a covered dish and a dish of cranberry sauce. Almost everything in the upper half is white: curtains, tablecloth, plates, the grandmother's apron. Rockwell admired the difficulty of painting white on white, and the turkey's glossy brown is the strongest color in the room.

How it was made

Rockwell worked from photographs. He posed friends and neighbors from Arlington, Vermont, individually and painted them into the scene; his wife Mary and his cook, Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton, who is the woman with the turkey, are among them. The setting is Rockwell's own living room. He reportedly painted the turkey on Thanksgiving Day itself.

Reception

The Four Freedoms were an immediate success. The Post paired each image with an essay, and Freedom from Want appeared with a piece by the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan. The paintings toured the United States in 1943 to raise money for war bonds. In Europe, however, where people were enduring rationing and hunger, the overflowing table caused resentment, and Rockwell himself later admitted that it seemed to show overabundance rather than freedom from want. Since then it has become the defining American image of Thanksgiving, endlessly reproduced and parodied.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, which owns all four Freedoms. Related Thanksgiving images include Rockwell's Home for Thanksgiving, Jennie Augusta Brownscombe's The First Thanksgiving and Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Thankful Poor. More on the artist at Norman Rockwell.