Kings and Shine Boys Peek Over
Famed Artist’s Shoulders
As DrawsWorld’s Great Faces
World celebrities have peeked over Manuel Rosenberg’s shoulder. A strapping big man with frizzly hair and a tentative kind of chuckle, Rosenberg turned up at the motor transport convention in Dallas, pencil and sketchbook in hand. He was forced to sit in the girl’s corner at school when he was a lad because he drew caricatures. He sketches in Europe and America for ten years as a newspaper cartoonist. Now he edits and publishes the Advertiser in Cincinnati. But his flying fingers still won’t let a pencil lie unused. Peeking over an artist’s shoulder is an amusement for both Kings and shine boys, he said, during a visit at The News Building...
I talk with pictures.
-Manuel Rosenberg
Uncle Manuel & Me
"You are most like your Uncle Manuel," my dad's brother Alan would say to me. "He was an artist, adventurer, entrepreneur, art school graduate, and New York sophisticate. You went to art school and film school and traveled the globe and you write about your adventures, just like him.
Library & Museum Collections
In 2016, while researching her ancestry, artist and filmmaker Anita Rosenberg discovered three hundred original drawings and typed notes belonging to her great-uncle, Manuel Rosenberg, at Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Lifting the lid off that first gray archival box, she uncovered a magical connection to the past—and to her own artistic heritage.
Manuel Rosenberg was an artist, illustrator, and newspaperman whose drawings and stories reached millions of readers during his thirteen-year career as sketch artist and art editor for the Cincinnati Post, a Scripps-Howard newspaper, from 1917 to 1930. He sketched presidents, kings, actors, musicians, and notorious personalities, and traveled the world documenting the people and places he encountered.
What began as a family discovery became a ten-year adventure, culminating in Uncle Manuel & Me, a three-book archival collection now preserved in nine libraries and museums. Together, the books bring his remarkable career and the world he witnessed back to life.
Performers
It is best to see the subject personally and make your sketch from life.
- Manuel Rosenberg, 1922
Manuel Rosenberg worked the "celebrity beat," among other assignments, as a long-time newspaper art director and journalist for the Cincinnati Post. From 1918 to 1932, Rosenberg quickly sketched the likenesses of the biggest stars of the day passing through the Midwest on tour. He was recognized as "one of the most skillful and one of the youngest cartoonists in the world."
- Salt Lake City, August 15, 1917
Famous People
Mr. Rosenberg had audiences with most of the kings, popes, and dictators of Europe.
- Cincinnati Post, April 29, 1967
Manuel "Rosie" Rosenberg spent 32 years as a Journalist, a Foreign Correspondent covering 30 countries, and an Artist whose personality sketches were known worldwide.
- The Advertiser, 1938
Travel
Rosenberg's illustrations and stories of Russia are the first ever published in any newspaper anywhere.
-Cincinnati Post, September 4, 1929
Wherever Manuel went, his celebrity status and letters of introduction flung open the doors of palaces, secret passageways of monasteries, backstage access to theaters, and the inner sanctum of the Vatican.
