5. Teaching and Working in Pennsylvania

Teaching & Work in Pennsylvania

Upon settling in New Hope, Rosin took a teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Over the course of his thirty-three-year tenure at the Academy, Rosin taught classes on figure construction and sculpture. However, the perpetually energetic Rosin did not allow his newfound teaching career to interfere with his creative work. A prolific sculptor, Rosin continued to garner major commissions during the early New Hope era, the first of which he received from Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Art Association, which asked him to sculpt two statues for the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial Sculpture Garden. These would eventually become “The Puritan” and “The Quaker.” Completed in 1942, “The Puritan” and “The Quaker” are still proudly exhibited in the South Terrace of the garden. “The Quaker” would go on to win the Samuels Memorial Award.

Rosin was very much a pragmatist when it came to his work. According to his daughter, Tory, he would sell nearly anything on his property to whomever offered a fair price for it. Much of his work was commission-based, and after all, he had a family to support. Still, Rosin’s talent for creating pieces that had a simple, representational form and style made him stand out in an era of abstract and modern art.

^{The early forties were definitely a time of change for Rosin. In order to help the war effort, he spent 1942 in Trenton, New Jersey designing naval bombers for the military at the General Motors plant. [1]  In 1943, he and his wife had their only child, Victoria.}

Awards & Exhibitions

Rosin continued to win awards for his work through the forties, with his “Reclining Nude” earning a Gold Medal Award from the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1942. This recognition was actually how the Samuel Committee discovered the young sculptor. Rosin was very fond of the “Reclining Nude,” and stated that if he had to choose one piece to represent him in his hometown museum, that would be it. A few fellow artists eventually banded together in 1947 to buy “Reclining Nude” and presented it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.^[2]

In the mid-forties, Rosin was honored by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a one-man exhibition of thirty-three of his pieces, from December 8, 1945 to January 7, 1946. Most of the pieces exhibited were portrait sculptures, owing largely to the time he would spend on commissions, and the exhibit was very well-received. Among Rosin’s works present at the exhibition was “Mother and Child”, a slightly smaller than life size statue that would go on to grace the entry hall of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia from the mid-1940’s until the hospital’s extensive renovations in the late twentieth century. Rosin was again honored in 1946 by the Academy, though this time with a $1,000 Arts and Letters Grant, awarded in “…recognition of his fine sense of form and excellent craftsmanship displayed in the rendering of both the figure and the portrait bust.”^[3] Rosin obviously found quite a bit of professional success and recognition in the forties. By 1949, he had built a larger new house for his family, a project largely funded by the Samuels Memorial Award won by “The Quaker”.

The fifties brought more major public commissions to Rosin’s studio and validated the sculptor’s career in an ironic manner. Once in jest, Rosin said that an artist didn’t know the value of his work until it gets stolen. And in 1954, that’s exactly what happened when R. Sturgis Ingersoll, the then president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the owner of a 41-inch bronze Rosin statue entitled “Tahitian Woman,” had the piece stolen right out of his garden.^[4]

Sculpting Mr. Baseball

In 1953, upon the request of the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, Rosin completed the “Deerfield Boy,” a 4-foot-2-inch tall bronze statue meant to represent the typical academy student. Valley Forge Military Academy made a similar request in 1957, commissioning the “Valley Forge Cadet.” But perhaps one of Rosin’s most famous pieces was also completed in 1957 – the 16-ton bronze statue of Connie Mack called “Mr. Baseball.” To help him sculpt it, Rosin hired a New York photography company to blow up a famous image of Mack, foot on the dugout and scorecard in hand, to a length of eight feet. He hung it up in his studio and then used it to figure out the size of the statue’s pedestal.

“Mr. Baseball” was proudly exhibited in front of the Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia before being moved to Veteran’s Stadium where it stood until the stadium’s demolition in 2004. After the stadium was demolished, a large sports complex replaced it just west of Route 95. The new baseball park is currently known as Citizen’s Bank Park. Connie Mack stands proudly just outside and in front of the west side at the suites entrance.