Marriage License is a painting by American illustrator Norman Rockwell. It was originally created for the cover of the June 11, 1955, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. It depicts a young man and woman filling out a marriage license application at city hall in front of a bored-looking clerk. The painting was based off of reference photos taken of Stockbridge native Joan Lahart, her fiancée Francis Mahoney, a retired NBA player, and local shopkeeper Jason Braman. Since appearing on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, the painting has been praised by critics and is considered one of Rockwell's best works.

Creation

Norman Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1953 to be close to his wife, who was receiving treatment at the Austen Riggs Center.[1] He set up his studio and continued to paint magazine covers and yearly Boy Scout calendar illustrations. For the rest of his career, Rockwell would often use local townsfolk as models for his paintings. Marriage License follows this pattern with three models - a young couple and an older man - drawn from the community.[2]

In 1954, Peggy Lahart, a nurse at the Riggs center, was approached to pose for a painting depicting a bride-to-be.[2][3] Peggy passed along the opportunity to her younger sister Joan who was engaged to Francis "Moe" Mahoney, a retired NBA player. After some prodding, Moe agreed to pose for Rockwell with his fiancée. For their photo shoot, Rockwell told the couple what to wear: a specific yellow summer dress with puffed sleeves for Joan and a "light blue shirt and wingtips" for Moe.[2][3] Since it was winter, a summer dress was impossible to find in Stockbridge, so it had to be custom made.[3] For their efforts, Moe and Joan were both paid $25 (equivalent to $250 in 2021) and received an oil sketch of the painting as a wedding gift from Rockwell.[2][4]

The older man was modeled by Jason Braman, a shopkeeper in Stockbridge, whose wife had recently died.[5] Rockwell originally posed Braman sitting towards where the couple would be standing in the painting.[6] During the photo shoot he relaxed and "slumped down" in the chair looking uninterested.[7] Rockwell took a liking to this more natural pose and used it in the final painting.[8]

Composition

Marriage License is set at city hall in a dark office filled with bookshelves.[9] A young man and woman stand in front of a tall desk filling out their application for a marriage license.[10] The man is wearing a tan suit and has his arm protectively around his fiancée.[11] The woman is wearing a yellow dress with high heels, but has to stand on her tiptoes to sign the document. Light from the open window beams down on the couple's faces. Behind the desk sits a uninterested older man wearing a bowtie.[10] A cat is seen on the floor beside his chair. In the background, there is a calendar showing June 11, 1955, the same date as the The Saturday Evening Post issue the painting was the cover for.[10] On top of the bookshelf is an unfolded United States flag, thought to be a sign that the couple has come in at the very end of the day by the Norman Rockwell Museum.[12]

Reception and legacy

Marriage License has been widely, but not universally, praised by critics and art historians. Thomas Buechner, writing in the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition of Rockwell's works, considered the painting, with Breaking Home Ties, one of Rockwell's two best works.[13] Leslie Judd Porter found the painting to be boring and "pedestrian" in her scathing 1955 review of the Rockwell exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art for The Washington Post.[14] Art critic Deborah Solomon found the painting to be at the "peak of his [Rockwell's] talents as a realist painter".[15] John Updike enjoyed the painting's small and unnecessary details.[16] Popular-art historian Christopher Finch praised the painting, writing that he considers Marriage License to be iconic, one of Rockwell's "most successful canvases," and belonging "with the very finest examples of Rockwell's art".[17] Solomon, Dave Ferman, of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and philosopher of art Marcia Muelder Eaton have compared Marriage License and the painting to those of the Dutch old masters, such as Johannes Vermeer, due to the dark interiors and Rockwell's use of light.[18][19][20] Solomon and Ferman compare the paintings positively while Eaton's comparison is much more mixed; she finds that it required technical skill to produce, but it is "bad art" because it is vulgar and childish.[21]

There were plans for a Christmas-themed film based on Marriage License and several Norman Rockwell paintings in 1979, but it was never picked up by a television network and the project was abandoned.[22] In 2004, Mad Magazine parodied Marriage License, depicting a pair of gay men.[23] It was re-posted in 2012 on Mad's website in celebration of the Second Circuit striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor.[24]

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