In her decades as a courtroom artist, Jane Rosenberg has used her trusty pastels to sketch some of the most infamous moments in American legal history.
She was there when Susan Smith apologized to her estranged husband for drowning their two young sons in a South Carolina lake, and when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty of the carnage at the Boston Marathon bombing. When Donald Trump appeared in a Manhattan courtroom to be arraigned on charges of falsifying business records, Rosenberg was there to capture his “Day-Glo complexion: base layers of red, purple, even green and blue, that were softened and smoothed over with lighter pinks and whites, accented with strokes of burnt sienna.”
Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist takes a mesmerizing look at this rarest of professions. In a time of Court TV and paparazzi, the idea of artists capturing legal drama through drawing is almost quaint. Yet Rosenberg’s images continue to be broadcast by news outlets around the world: Woody Allen and Mia Farrow sitting stone-faced during their custody battle, Harvey Weinstein crumpled in a wheelchair listening to victim impact statements, John Gotti with his shock of silver hair. Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Cosby, Tom Brady: She has sketched them all. (And in the case of Brady, had her artwork go viral for all the wrong reasons when she struggled to capture the particular angles of his face. She calls the ensuing media attention “a storm which struck with hurricane force.”)
As talented as Rosenberg is at drawing, she is an equally gifted writer. She describes the technique she has honed over so many years and cases, how she quickly builds sketches that capture singular moments in court, even as the action continues in front of her. She writes in visceral detail about being one of the few in-person witnesses during the most vulnerable moments of so many famous and powerful people. An utterly absorbing read, Drawn Testimony captures “the rhythms of a criminal trial and the layers of humanity they could contain—stunning tales of ambition, betrayal, family, and bloodshed.”
