At the Optometrist
1955 painting by Norman Rockwell
At the Optometrist, also known as The Oculist or Eye Doctor, is an oil on canvas painting by American artist Norman Rockwell. It was painted in 1955 and illustrated on the front cover of The Saturday Evening Post on May 19, 1956. It was one of over 300 illustrations for the Post featuring Rockwell's work from 1916 to 1963. The painting depicts a frustrated young boy at an optometrist's office being fitted for glasses by a grinning doctor. The painting is in the collection of the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts (WCMFA) in Hagerstown, Maryland, U.S.
The WCMFA acquired the painting in 1957 after its then-director wrote a letter to an art editor from Curtis Publishing Company. Rockwell himself responded and agreed to sell his work at a low price. It has been on display at the WCMFA since then, except for when it is lent to exhibitions at other institutions, including the Norman Rockwell Museum. It has become one of the WCMFA's most popular works and was restored in 2021 on the 90th anniversary of the museum's founding.
Description
At the Optometrist, also known as The Oculist or Eye Doctor, is an oil on canvas painting depicting a young boy with red hair and freckles being fitted for glasses at an optometrist's office. The boy is sitting in a chair while holding a baseball glove with one hand.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “At the Optometrist” is 1955 painting by Norman Rockwell. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Optometrist, painting and Norman, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q140478394. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1955, 1956, 1916 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “At the Optometrist” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.