March 28, 2024

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‘A lot of expression’: Courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg talks about drawing Trump at his impeachment

‘A lot of expression’: Courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg talks about drawing Trump at his impeachment

Jane Rosenberg got her start as a courtroom sketch artist painting prostitutes in a New York night courthouse in 1980.

Forty-three years later, Rosenberg’s latest subject is former President Donald Trump, whose indictment in Manhattan Tuesday of 34 counts of falsifying business records afforded her the opportunity to draw two viral cartoons of the accused.

“My hands just fly,” Rosenberg said of the time he was painting Trump. “My fingers were moving faster than my brain, and then it was over.”

The New Yorker publishes Rosenberg’s outline of Trump on the cover of its April 17 issue, marking the first time in its history that the magazine has printed a courtroom outline on its cover. For a magazine whose cover art often carves a place in popular culture and history, The New Yorker’s decision to print Rosenberg’s drawing marked a historic point not only for Rosenberg’s career but also for courtroom painting more broadly.

Rosenberg emerged as an artist in the late 1970s when abstraction was the norm, rather than the realism she portrayed in her courtroom work.

“I did portraits in my kitchen as a wardrobe portrait artist,” she said.

She eventually found herself working as a portrait artist in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s, though she was looking for a more stable way to make money as an artist.

In courtrooms where photography is prohibited, artists offer the public a way to see court proceedings within court, selling the right to their art to the media for profit. Rosenberg learned about courtroom graphics during a lecture, then made her way to court with some lawyer friends from college to experiment with the art form.

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A week later, Rosenberg was sitting in the jury box of a Manhattan courtroom drawing a portrait of a defendant during a trial. She then sold her first professional courtroom sketch to NBC News, which filmed the sketch and put it on television.

“I came home and watched it on my little black-and-white TV, called my dad and said, ‘I’m watching TV,'” Rosenberg said.

This first success set Rosenberg on the path of painting such famous witnesses and defendants as John Gotti, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Tom Brady (although this drawing went viral for not fully capturing the famous football player), having her art appear in museums and the Library of Congress, and being one of The few people who attended Trump’s impeachment trial in person.

Rosenberg said she had been anticipating the Trump subpoena moment for weeks.

“As soon as I announced, ‘I’m arrested on Tuesday,’ I had a lot of people interested in drawing,” she said, referring to a post Trump sent to Truth Social on March 18 about his then-possible arrest.

While Trump was not arrested on Tuesday, the indictment came a week later on March 30, followed by a trial on April 4.

According to court documents, prosecutors alleged that Trump was involved in a “scheme” to boost his chances during the 2016 presidential election through a series of silent financial payments made by others and repeated falsification of New York business records to cover up this alleged criminal behavior. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, has pleaded not guilty to being charged on all 34 counts.

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When it came time for trial, Rosenberg arrived at court early, waited for hours and passed several layers of security to get a seat in the witness box to appear in court. Between the number of officers in the courtroom and the commotion from protesters and the media outside, the atmosphere in the courtroom has been described as unprecedented.

“When I first arrived,” she said, “there were the largest number of court officers I had ever seen in a courtroom,” though she noted that the courtroom itself was “as quiet as it can get” during the actual trial.

When she settled in, she began working on her first drawing using pastels—drawing the foreground of the sketch before Trump entered the courtroom. Anticipating a short court appearance, she acted quickly.

“I thought I had seven minutes to do a quick sketch and needed to get out,” she said.

But with the hearing lasting longer than expected, she decided to do a second sketch—one that eventually made it to the cover of The New Yorker. When her pen hit the paper, Trump’s expression changed, she said, eyeing the government attorney and giving him a “sideways eye.”

She said, “He held this position; I felt like, ‘Ugh, I have to have this moment.'”

The final drawing shows an expressive Trump, with the eyebrows and frown prominent.

When asked about social media users who claim there are similarities between the former President’s scheme and the Grinch’s Dr. Seuss, Rosenberg defended her work. Trump was looking “a little sad,” as she put it.

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“No way—I wouldn’t have done the Grinch on purpose,” said Rosenberg. “First of all, I tried to show the expression I saw; that’s what I tried to capture.”

Rosenberg said she enjoyed drawing the former president if anything.

“He’s got a great head to paint, his hair is a bit like a hat, and he’s got a lot of expression in that face – he’s fun to draw,” she said.

Rosenberg said she has no plans to sell Trump’s physical drawings, despite expressed interest in the pieces. It has already sold the rights to use the graphics to multiple outlets, including directly to ABC News.

Selling her work to newspapers and media outlets around the world and achieving a New Yorker cover is enough for the viral artist, who has arguably reached the top of the courtroom graphics mountain.

“Maybe that’s it—I’ve made it to the top and it’s over—maybe there’s nothing else,” she said. “But you never know; I’m going to get on with it.”