. In that famous and stirring speech, Roosevelt enumerated four basic freedoms to which every person was entitled.
The first was freedom of speech. Second was freedom to worship. Third was freedom from want. Fourth was freedom from fear.
The images and articles were presented in The Saturday Evening Post in the same order as President Roosevelt presented them in his speech.
Norman Rockwell's Freedom from Fear
Rockwell was worried that this painting would appear to portray smugness that American children slept safely while the children of the rest of the world lived in a battlefield. He didn't want to chance alienating our allies in the war.
Rockwell went into a lot of detail with this picture. He actually had The Bennington Banner, in Bennington, Vermont, print up
a prop newspaper with a war bombing headline. He was a real stickler for realism in his paintings.
Rockwell used his Vermont neighbors as models in this picture. The model for the father in this picture was Jim Martin and he appears in all four of the Four Freedoms paintings. The other neighborss who modeled for this painting are Dorothy Lawrence, Margie Coulter and David Squiers.
This painting shows a father and mother tucking their two children in at bedtime.
The children's mother carefully places their covers just right to keep them warm. She is careful not to wake them.
The father, with a concerned yet caring look look on his face, holds a newspaper and his reading glasses in one hand. The headline of the newspaper father is holding reads "Bombings K... Horror Hit..." This was published during the time that London was being bombed by Nazi Germany.
No doubt, the father is relieved that his family is not living in war-torn Europe. All the fathers in America were similarly relieved. Rockwell's painting made the parents of America more aware of their relief.
Norman Rockwell's work was usually topical to current events, and Freedom from Fear was no exception.
This picture was also printed on Office of War Information poster OWI Poster Number 46 O-511887.
The captions on the original war poster read as follows: "OURS... to fight for " above and "FREEDOM FROM WANT" underneath the illustration.
