To prepare to paint The Coach: Knute Rockne in the Locker Room at Notre Dame, Arnold Friberg flew to Notre Dame, Indiana. Before creating the art piece he wanted to visit the actual stadium and locker room where the famed Rockne had worked with the team.

The Notre Dame airport was small and Friberg hoped that there would be someone to welcome him. As the plane taxied he saw one of the most elaborate greetings he had ever encountered. The university’s band was playing and all the officials were gathered. Deeply moved, he stepped from the plane, not certain how he would address the waiting throngs. But before he was given the opportunity to say anything, he glanced over and saw Senator Robert Kennedy, the true recipient of the grand welcome. Kennedy had arrived on a different plane, which had landed just moments before Friberg’s plane touched down.

Arnold Friberg often worked with great rapidity to produce great artwork. Sometime between 1951 and 1953 he produced two large paintings (each 36 by 44 inches) in a week. Friberg’s ability to store images in his mind and to recall them in explicit detail is phenomenal. Friberg explained his artistic process this way:

Who knew Arnold Friberg’s art would ever be used as a publicity stunt for a major motion picture. The success of an extremely high-budget film like The Ten Commandments depended in large measure upon generating substantial publicity. Arnold Friberg was hired to produce 12 art pieces that would be used in a calendar. Paramount pictures made a deal with Brown & Bigelow Company, a giant in the calendar field. Today it is common for a movie company to partner with and another company to cross promote, but this was rare in the ’50s. Paramount stood to gain extensive publicity, and Friberg would collect royalties on the calendar sales, which were projected at close to fifty million copies. Each month had one of the 12 Biblical art piece.

Private art collectors have made huge financial offers for Arnold Friberg’s original painting The Prayer at Valley Forge, but Friberg is hoping to place it in a more prominent public location related to our national heritage. He would especially like it to be seen by school children to help restore the spirit Friberg feels we have all but lost in our land.

To create a piece of art that depicted George Washington at Valley Forge accurately, Arnold Friberg felt that it was important to experience some of the environmental pressures that were bearing down on Washington at that discouraging time in his life. Friberg wanted a sense of the physical and spiritual stress that would come during a winter at Valley Forge. To develop this artistic mood, he decided to fly to the Pennsylvania site in February to experience the cold for himself.

Ironically, right before Friberg made the trip it had not snowed at Valley Forge. But by the time he arrived, the first storm of the season was in full force, creating mounds of deep snow. Friberg took the timely snowfall as a good omen; it seemed that the very elements themselves were cooperating to produce the amazing piece of art.