Charlotte Sorenson was riffling through a newspaper one morning in December when she recognized someone in a gallery advertisement for a Norman Rockwell painting that she had not seen in years: herself.
There she was, a teenager in a cluster of schoolmates in graduation-day caps and gowns. Rockwell had called the painting âBright Future for Banking.â
Sorenson, who is 81 and lives in Boulder, Colo., had posed for Rockwell when she was a 15-year-old high school sophomore in Stockbridge, where Rockwell lived and worked from 1953 until his death in 1978. As the star illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, he was known for summoning his neighbors to his studio to be models â dozens over the years. They were the faces in the quintessentially American images that the public loved but critics disdained. Sometimes, he supplied the accessories at his easel, long after his subjects had left his studio. But for âBright Future,â Sorenson said, he had a cap and gown a
A Model and Her Norman Rockwell Meet Again
The illustrator’s paintings told his stories. Now a teenage subject reveals her own, 67 years later.
“Bright Future for Banking” by Norman Rockwell, circa 1955. Charlotte Sorenson, then 15, is in white, full profile, in the lower center. She posed alone but was later flanked by schoolmates.Credit.Norman Rockwell
March 9, 2021
Charlotte Sorenson was riffling through a newspaper one morning in December when she recognized someone in a gallery advertisement for a Norman Rockwell painting that she had not seen in years: herself.
There she was, a teenager in a cluster of schoolmates in graduation-day caps and gowns. Rockwell had called the painting “Bright Future for Banking.”