Between 1925 and 1990, Brown & Bigelow released a yearly calendar for the Boy Scouts of America featuring a painting by illustrators Norman Rockwell and Joseph Cesatari. Rockwell only failed to complete a painting for two years: 1928 and 1930; Cesatari completed a painting for every year. The illustrations show scouts of different kinds – Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA, Venturing, Sea Scouts, and Air Scouts – engaging in mostly outdoor activities. The calendars were large – – and featured a single image for the year; the months were changed by tearing off a paper portion at the bottom. The idea for the calendar series was thought up by an unknown staff member at Brown & Bigelow in 1923. After seeing the impact on recruitment of the BSA's use of Rockwell's paintings for The Red Cross Magazine that were donated to the organization by the American Red Cross, the staff member wondered if Brown & Bigelow could help by publishing a calendar with one of the paintings. Later that year, James E. West, the Chief Scout Executive, agreed to Brown & Bigelow's proposal for a 1925 calendar with repurposed art. The chosen painting, A Good Scout, was originally titled A Red Cross Man in the Making and depicts a scout bandaging a foot of a spaniel puppy under the eye of its mother. Assuming the calendar would sell well, the BSA, Brown & Bigelow, and Rockwell worked out a deal for future calendars. Rockwell would paint his paintings years in advance so that it could be the cover of Boys Life early in the year to advertise that year's calendar. Two early years of the calendar series – 1928 and 1930 – were missed due to Rockwell having too many other commissions. To prevent this from happening in the future and to control the content of the paintings, James E. West devised a yearly workflow. Early in the year, the BSA and Rockwell would both pitch ideas for the painting to be used for the calendar in two years and decide on the theme. While Rockwell was working in his studio, a member of the BSA's staff would come by to check the details of the painting. Every person depicted had to be the idealized version of a scout or scout leader and every uniform had to be depicted correctly. The tents and other outdoors gear that scouts use in the paintings had to be the right type and could not look like army surplus. After the initial draft of the painting was finished, West and other BSA staff members would find issues that needed to be corrected. Between 1925 and 1976, Rockwell created 49 paintings for the BSA's Brown & Bigelow calendar. Every illustration, besides A Good Scout in 1925, was painted specifically for the calendar. Several of the paintings found a secondary purpose as the covers of the various handbooks the BSA publishes. Three paintings – Spirit of America, The Scouting Trail, and Come and Get It – were reused as the cover illustration of the Boy Scout Handbook. The Adventure Trail was used as the cover art for the 1954 edition of the Den Chief's Handbook, and The Scoutmaster was repurposed as the cover of the 1960 edition of the Scoutmaster's Handbook. A majority of the illustrations, including Forward America and Beyond the Easel, are in the collection of the National Scouting Museum. In 2020 as a part of the BSA's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, the organization listed the paintings as assets. The rest reside in private collections or the collections of museums such as The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. After Rockwell's retirement in 1976, the BSA asked Joseph Cesatari to take over the calendar series. From 1969 to 1972, Cesatari was the art director in the advertising division of the BSA; he became the art director of Boys Life in 1973. Between 1977 and 1990, Cesatari created 14 paintings for the BSA's Brown & Bigelow calendar. Like Rockwell, all of the illustrations were created specifically for the calendar. Unlike Rockwell, none of the calendar paintings were repurposed for handbook covers. Due to declining sales, Brown & Bigelow cancelled the calendars in 1990; The Scoutmaster was the final painting created for the series.
