Girl at Mirror
This painting appeared on the Saturday Evening Post cover in 1954. Nothing in the composition is where it permanently belongs: the mirror is leaning against the chair, the stool is in the middle of the room, the handheld mirror, brush, and make-up are scattered on the floor, the doll is cast aside, as a symbol of a childhood present but left. Even the girl herself is not yet fully dressed, wearing only a petticoat. All these little composition decisions come together to tell us that this girl is someplace between being a child and a woman, and she knows it.
The actress Jane Russell looks up at the girl from the magazine page, and the girl looks at herself in the mirror, framing her face with her hands as if asking herself: "but will I ever be like her?" Rockwell transformed this simple scene into something universal. He made more than 300 covers for the Post, without repeating himself, for 47 years. Each of its models embodies a nuance, a question, an idea of American people. Rockwell managed to break the boundary between illustration and significant arts, creating images capable of speaking to the heart, to the intelligence and experience of people, just like the great works of art exhibited in museums, resistant to time.
