(November 20, 1874 – July 21, 1970)
James N. Rosenberg was an American lawyer, artist, humanitarian, and writer. In law, he is remembered for his handling of the collapsed business empire of the so-called “Swedish Match King,” Ivar Kreuger. In art, he is remembered for two types of pictures, on the one hand, realist landscapes of the Adirondack Mountains in which critics saw a strong feeling for nature and a refined rather than exuberant sensibility, and on the other, dramatic scenes that, as one critic said, “recall the Wall Street crash of 1929, the triumph of ‘Ironism’ in his native Pittsburgh and the potential terror of ‘atomism’ in the nuclear age.”[1] As a humanist, he worked to protect freedom of speech, end the persecution of minority communities, aid refugees, and mitigate conflict among nations. In this work, he is remembered for leading a group of civic, religious, labor, racial, and business leaders whose single goal was the passage and subsequent ratification of the United Nations Genocide Convention.