Yodke Cuzman

This is one of the most romantic paintings in American history, but the artist hid a second story in it, one that only reveals itself once you know who the tired old man in the corner really was... The painting is Marriage License, made by Norman Rockwell for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1955. It is late on a Saturday afternoon in a small-town clerk's office. A young couple leans over the desk to fill out the paperwork for their marriage license, the man's arm around her, the woman up on tiptoe in a yellow dress to sign her name. The whole room is dim and brown, and a shaft of golden light falls through the window and lands on just the two of them, as if the day itself knows what is happening here. Rockwell built it out of contrast: the couple glow with the beginning of everything, and, slumped in the corner, the old clerk waits, ready to go home, because for him, couples in love are just the ordinary traffic of an ordinary day. But here is what almost no one knows: the clerk was a real man, a local shopkeeper named Jason Braman, and Rockwell chose him for a reason. Braman had recently lost his wife. Rockwell knew it, and he asked him to pose, in his own words, "as a way to give him something else to think about." So the tired old man watching two young people promise themselves to each other is not acting. He is a widower placed by Rockwell right beside the very thing he has just lost. Once you know that, the whole painting deepens because it is no longer only about young love. It is about the full arc of it, the beginning and the end in one room, the couple who have everything ahead and the man who had it and lost it, sitting a few feet apart in the same afternoon light. And here's the best part: the young couple were real too, engaged in life, Joan and Francis Mahoney, and Rockwell gave them the oil sketch as a wedding present. They married. And they stayed married for the rest of their lives...