Harry Roseland's "To the Highest Bidder"

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"To the Highest Bidder"
by Harry Roseland

This is the painting that Oprah has in her hallway that she mentions in interviews as keeping her grounded.
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"According to a segment shared widely by CNN, during the opening of the exhibit last week, Winfrey said that she keeps a 6-foot painting of an enslaved woman on the auction block holding her daughter’s hand placed prominently in her home, so that amid all of that opulence she remains grounded.
“I cannot come in the door ... or I cannot leave, without passing that painting,” said Winfrey of the work that she says she’s owned for 30 years, titled, “To the Highest Bidder,” by Harry Roseland. “I am reminded of where I come from every day of my life.”
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About The Artist
Biography

Harry Roseland was born in 1866 to German immigrants in Brooklyn, New York, where he lived his entire life. Roseland studied art under John Bernard Whittaker at Adelphi College in Brooklyn, James Carroll Beckwith in Manhattan, and possibly Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia Before arriving at the style he became known for, Roseland experimented with landscapes, figure paintings, and still lifes. Between 1888 and 1898, he mainly painted scenes of working and agricultural life in New York City’s outer boroughs.

In the last years of the century, Roseland developed his signature theme: realist portrayals of Black Americans. He typically depicted small groups of figures in domestic settings, his most common motif being an interaction between a young, upper class, white female and an elderly, lower class, black woman. By adopting this focus, contemporaries noted that the artist carved a niche in American art for himself. In 1899, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle commented, “We have a painter in Brooklyn who has recently developed a field quite his own, and the popularity of his pictures bids fair to make him one of the most successful of the local artists.”

While many scholars have surmised that Roseland probably never visited the South, a 1927 article in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle recounts Roseland’s earlier travels in Louisiana to “study black people” and interview former slaves as research for his paintings.

In addition to actively exhibiting his original works, Roseland is also remembered for his success as a commercial artist. His paintings were reproduced lithographically and distributed as marketing incentives for various businesses around the turn of the century. For example, Knox Gelatin Co. advertised in popular magazines that by submitting an empty gelatin box with ten cents for shipping, the customer would receive a chromolithograph of a “famous painting” by Roseland. Truth, a monthly literary magazine, advertised a similar offer: along with the purchase of the magazine, the customer would be sent a “charming” reproduction of “this famous artist’s canvases.”

Over the course of his career, Roseland won many awards at exhibitions throughout the United States including the National Academy of Design, the Salmagundi Club, and the 1902 Charleston Exposition. His work now resides in the permanent collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Morris Museum.

Source:https://www.questroyalfineart.com/artist/harry-roseland/