Verizon Donates ‘The Lineman’

To Norman Rockwell Museum

AP — VERIZON DONATES “THE LINEMAN” TO NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM

AVV 3-17 #732131

STOCKBRIDGE, MASS. (AP) — “The Lineman,” one of Norman Rockwell’s iconic slice-of-life paintings, will permanently join many of his other works in the Stockbridge museum that bears his name.

Verizon is donating the $2 million painting to the Norman Rockwell Museum, where it has been displayed on loan for two years.

Rockwell painted it for a 1948 American Telephone & Telegraph ad campaign. He was inspired by a telephone lineman he spotted working in Cheshire.

New England Telephone Co. once owned it, but Verizon inherited it after a series of mergers. It hung in Verizon’s Franklin Street building in Boston for years.

A museum official says “The Lineman” joins about 700 other Rockwell paintings, drawings and studies there. They include his famous “Four Freedoms” and “The Runaway” pieces.