Samuel Rosenberg (1896-1972)
God’s Chillun, 1934
Born in Philadelphia, Samuel Rosenberg, who would become known as “The Dean of Pittsburgh Painters,” moved with his family to that city in 1907 at the age of eleven. He taught at Carnegie Tech for forty years (1924-1964), where he had earned his degree in 1926, as well as at the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College, 1937-1945).
Beginning as a portraitist, he later made many paintings portraying the socioeconomic life of the inner city. Artists nationwide pursued an art of social protest and conscience as conditions worsened for the urban poor throughout the Depression. Rosenberg’s Social Realist God’s Chillun (1934) portrays an incident of African-American street life in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. A religious revival proceeds down Crawford Street, led by a large woman at the center who wears a white dress emblazoned with sash bearing the words “Faith, Hope, and Charity.” She sings and bangs a drum, accompanied by a crowd of others with cymbals and trumpets. The neighborhood where the artist lived also had a large Jewish population. Many other canvases were inspired by the scenes he saw near his home, including Eviction (1935). His pantings became more expressively abstract in style during the forties.
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