The final destination for the traveling show is the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York. Critics of yore are spinning over that one. In Rockwell paintings we find America's Everyfamily, the hometown boy and girl, mother and father, grandmother and grandfather who built on the dream of our Founding Fathers. They are as individualized as universalized, with the fruits of the Declaration of Independence spilling into our daily lives. It's about faith and tolerance, the religious and secular coexistent in the landscape of everyday life.
Prayer is part of the mix.
So is the gratitude for the bounty of the table. The details are painted with an exquisite virtuosity of perspective. The barber shop in the foreground of the painting is dark because it is closed, and a group of men have gathered together in a well-lighted barely visible back room where two men are tuning a violin and a clarinet. An easy and secure masculinity pervades the canvas, documenting a more innocent time when men gathered in fellowship after the day's work, the entrepreneurial spirit at leisure. As a nation we've always celebrated the Fourth of July by combining patriotism with picnics, fireworks with fireflies, love of country with love of family, the commonplace in the context of community, the hope, joy, poignancy and promise that resides in every American moment.