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Harry Roseland
1866–1950
BirthplaceBrooklyn, New York, United States of America
Death placeBrooklyn, New York, United States of America
Biography
Harry Roseland painted portraits and works of genre, or scenes of everyday life, on subjects ranging from immigrant agricultural workers on New York farms to urban scenes of everyday life in New York City. Roseland was born to German immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York, where he spent his entire life. Initially self-taught, he studied art at the Adelphi Art Academy in Brooklyn with painter John Barnard Whittaker (1836–1926) and in New York with figure and landscape artist J. Carroll Beckwith.
Unlike many successful American artists of his generation, Roseland never visited Europe to further his studies, and he sought out specific subject matter that had received little attention from other American artists. At a young age in the early 1880s, he began to paint genre scenes of African American life after Emancipation. His idealized scenes of everyday activities, such as women reading tea leaves, families sharing a meal together, and Sunday worship, became extremely popular, and even though Roseland had never visited the South, his paintings were received as authentic portrayals of post-Civil War life. By the late 1880s, Roseland turned his attention to subjects nearer at hand: the people who worked the potato and pea fields of Long Island, not far from his Brooklyn home. His Long Island farm hands are sturdy and industrious, and they join the New England country folk and picturesque European peasants frequently depicted by other American artists in the late nineteenth century. These subjects are examples of contemporary nostalgia for traditional life and rural virtues. Later in life, Roseland experimented with urban subjects such as the beach at Coney Island portrayed in the Terra Foundation's painting Coney Island (TF 1993.12).
Roseland's canvases were highly popular and well-regarded by his contemporaries. Widely reproduced in popular magazines, they garnered several prizes between 1885 and 1930 and were exhibited in prestigious annual salons at institutions in New York and other cities. Roseland's art fell out of critical favor in the last decades of his long career, but he continued to experiment with new subjects and approaches for his story-telling art.
Unlike many successful American artists of his generation, Roseland never visited Europe to further his studies, and he sought out specific subject matter that had received little attention from other American artists. At a young age in the early 1880s, he began to paint genre scenes of African American life after Emancipation. His idealized scenes of everyday activities, such as women reading tea leaves, families sharing a meal together, and Sunday worship, became extremely popular, and even though Roseland had never visited the South, his paintings were received as authentic portrayals of post-Civil War life. By the late 1880s, Roseland turned his attention to subjects nearer at hand: the people who worked the potato and pea fields of Long Island, not far from his Brooklyn home. His Long Island farm hands are sturdy and industrious, and they join the New England country folk and picturesque European peasants frequently depicted by other American artists in the late nineteenth century. These subjects are examples of contemporary nostalgia for traditional life and rural virtues. Later in life, Roseland experimented with urban subjects such as the beach at Coney Island portrayed in the Terra Foundation's painting Coney Island (TF 1993.12).
Roseland's canvases were highly popular and well-regarded by his contemporaries. Widely reproduced in popular magazines, they garnered several prizes between 1885 and 1930 and were exhibited in prestigious annual salons at institutions in New York and other cities. Roseland's art fell out of critical favor in the last decades of his long career, but he continued to experiment with new subjects and approaches for his story-telling art.