Norman Rockwell’s “Saying Grace” sold for $46 million in December 2013, but no buyer has been identified. Alice Walton, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are known, however, to be Rockwell collectors.
A little over a year ago, your Whispers staff speculated about the buyer of Norman Rockwell’s “Saying Grace,” which sold for $46 million, a record for an American painting, in a December 2013 auction at Sotheby’s.
Alice Walton, founder of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, is one of the top collectors of the illustrator’s art, along with filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. But the identity of the purchaser of “Saying Grace” was unknown.
That is, it was unknown until the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Lucas had bought the painting, which was the cover of the Nov. 24, 1951, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, the Thanksgiving issue.
Don Bacigalupi, who left as president of Crystal Bridges in early 2015 to head the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, gave Charles Desmarais, the art critic at the Chronicle, an exclusive look at the core of the Lucas collection.
San Francisco and then Chicago had been a contender for the Lucas Museum, but opposition over plans to locate it at a site near Lake Michigan caused Lucas to abandon Chicago and turn his eyes back toward San Francisco or Los Angeles. (As far as Whispers is concerned, our proposal that the “Star Wars” creator locate the $743 million Lucas Museum in Arkansas still stands.)
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