Harry Roseland found success as an artist who principally painted genre scenes and portraits of African Americans in the rural South. During the late 1800's, these scenes were accepted by art critics and his patrons as true-to-life representations of his subjects, but Roseland had never journeyed to the American South; he stayed in Brooklyn, where he was born to German parents, for much of his career. Roseland won several awards before the turn of the century, including the silver and gold medals at the Brooklyn Art Club, and the Second Hallgarten Prize of the National Academy of Design.
Much about Roseland's early life has been disputed, including the year he was born. For the most part self-taught, he studied at the Adelphi Academy, in Brooklyn under J.B. Whittaker and took lessons with J. Carroll Beckwith. Prior to achieving renown for his portrayals of African American life, Roseland earned income through lithographic reproductions of his paintings. He began to specialize in these scenes in the late 1870's or early 1880's, and most of his output occurred from the 1880's through the 1900's. He showed his work in solo exhibitions in New York and Boston galleries, and in group shows at the National Academy of Design, the Salmagundi Club, the Boston Art Club, and the American Water Color Society. In his late career, Roseland continued to paint his version of Southern African Americans, but with the rise of the Ashcan School and Social Realism, his popularity declined.
