Harry Herman Roseland (1868-1950)
Born in Brooklyn, Harry Herman Roseland was one of America’s finest genre painters during the late 19th and early 20th century. He studied with Thomas Eakins, C. Beckwith; J.B. Whittaker (in Brooklyn) and was a member of the Brooklyn Art Club (1896); the Brooklyn Painters and Sculptor’s Association and the Brooklyn Society of Painters.
Roseland became famous for painting common laborers in fields, picking cotton or berries in and around the New York and New England coastal areas, and he specialized in interior genre scenes of men discussing art and literature in smoke-filled libraries; black fortune tellers reading white women’s palms and tea leaves; and post-Civil War African Americans engaged in common everyday activities.
Information courtesy of Swann Galleries Inc.