20th century populist painter, once beloved by millions of Saturday Evening Post subscribers and rumpus room patriots, now mostly remembered as icon of kitsch sentimentalism and uppercased Bad Art. Rockwell, a stickler for representational accuracy - if not emotional verisimilitude - caught criticism early in his career for his unrepentant preference for photographs over life models as one important basis for his painting technique. Less controversial, surprisingly, was Rockwell's reliance on ether as a method of controlling uncooperative animal subjects. Until his death in 1978, Rockwell insisted that he'd never used such a technique on his human subjects, himself included.