SKU: p1547

It's a long way from her house to this park bench — all the way across town, in fact. She even had to negotiate those railroad tracks she's never supposed to cross without a grown-up (wouldn't Mom be mad!). But it was such a beautiful day, with the autumn breeze wafting across her face, and the steel wheels of her trusty skates clicking musically over every crack in the sidewalk. After this brief rest, she'll resume her adventure. It won't be easy to get back home in time for dinner, and she won't be able to tell anybody where she's been—but she'll feel a little rush of excitement as she remembers.

As we look back at this carefree skater from our modern vantage point of the 1980s, it's easy to forget that a far different set of social attitudes prevailed in America when Rockwell painted the original artwork for "Breaking the Rules" in 1942. (For example, scarcely twenty years had elapsed since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the historic act that granted American women the right to vote.

Of course, the reflection of any era's cultural values can be seen in its art, and the child portraiture of early twentieth-century America offered a classic case in point. Boys were often portrayed realistically, and allowed to get into the usual kinds of charming mischief; but portraits of little girls, with regrettably few exceptions (notably the female portraitists Sarah Stilwell Weber and Jessie Willcox Smith), frankly tended to the saccharine. The dimpled pixies were cute, to be sure, but interchangeably so. The girls themselves, like the portraits in which they appeared, were too often seen as static museum pieces—all but empty of vibrancy and an independent will.