Art by Norman Rockwell

Rockwell painted more than 300 covers for The Saturday Evening Post over nearly five decades, building an image of ordinary American life so widely reproduced it became, for better or worse, a kind of shorthand for the country's own idea of itself. His "Four Freedoms" series, based on a 1941 Roosevelt speech, toured the country during World War II to help sell war bonds, raising over $130 million. Later in his career, well past the point most people had pegged him as purely sentimental, he took on civil rights directly: "The Problem We All Live With" (1964) depicts a real event, six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted by federal marshals into a newly desegregated New Orleans school, painted with the same careful realism he'd spent decades using for magazine covers.