Marriage License

Marriage License is an oil painting by American illustrator Norman Rockwell 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 a government building in front of a bored-looking clerk.

He used photographs of local shopkeeper Jason Braman; Stockbridge, Massachusetts, native Joan Lahart; and her fiancé Francis Mahoney as a reference while creating the painting.

Lahart was suggested for the role by her sister Peggy, a nurse at the Austen Riggs Center where Mary Rockwell was receiving treatment.

[4] On top of the bookshelf is an unfolded United States flag, thought by the Norman Rockwell Museum to be a sign that the couple has come in at the very end of the day.

[5] Marriage License highlights two reoccurring themes in Norman Rockwell's works: the drab of ordinary life and the excitement of young love.

[10] Love is a topic that Rockwell explored extensively in paintings such as The Letterman (1938), Little Girl Observing Lovers on a Train (1944), Before the Date (1949), and The University Club (1960).

[17] Peggy passed the opportunity to her younger sister Joan, who was engaged to Francis "Moe" Mahoney, a retired NBA player, in January 1955.

For their photo shoot, Rockwell told the couple what to wear: a specific yellow summer dress with puffed sleeves for Lahart and a "light blue shirt and wingtips" for Mahoney.

[8] Using his collection of reference photographs, Rockwell composed a series of full-size sketches which were used to create a smaller final color study.

[15][note 2] A filing cabinet from the clerk's office made its way into a study but was removed in the final painting in favor of a potbelly stove to make the room look older.

[27] After the show, the work returned to Rockwell's collection until 1969 when it and thirty-four other paintings – including the Four Freedoms (1943) and Shuffleton's Barbershop (1950) – were permanently loaned to the Old Corner House in Stockbridge.

[28] In 1972 the painting was included in Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum on the condition that it was not part of the national tour of the same name.

[35] Writing in 1955 for The Washington Post, critic Leslie Judd Portner described the painting as boring and "pedestrian" in her scathing review of the Rockwell exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Much like Deborah Solomon and Dave Ferman of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Eaton notes that Marriage License is influenced by Dutch old masters, based on its use of light and dark interiors.

[49] The parody stays close to the source material but with the cast iron stove replaced by a photocopier, the spittoon becoming a trash can, and a pair of gay men signing their marriage license.

[52] Psychologists Earl Ginter, Gargi Roysircar and Lawrence Gerstein saw it instead as a commentary on the role of government in deciding which marriages are valid and which ones are not.