DRAWN TESTIMONY

Perhaps the best-known courtroom sketch artist working today looks over a long career and discusses her métier.

“I reach for the primary tool of my trade, a pastel pencil, and begin to draw,” writes Rosenberg. All those recent drawings of Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, and Stormy Daniels (“a slightly ethereal figure, hovering ghostlike behind Cohen”) in that New York City courtroom were the product of that pencil, just a few of the thousands of drawings Rosenberg has produced over the years. Starting off as a portraitist, she “put the ‘starving’ in starving artist,” then stumbled into courtroom art, freelance work that’s unpredictable and hard to plan around. Over her long career, she writes, it “has been considered the ultimate dying art.” Fortunately for her, some legal proceedings ban cameras; fortunately, too, art can sometimes convey human character and emotions in ways that elude photographers and videographers. So it was, she writes near the opening, that in the initial trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, she was able to capture the nuances of a woman who seemed to regard the courtroom as a theater stage and was responsive to Rosenberg’s presence: “She may have been wearing a mask almost throughout, but even with half a face she was giving me more to work with than many I have drawn across my long career.” A mask over Zoom impeded her ability to capture Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd, which “meant that my sketches were even more of a jigsaw puzzle than normal.” With a cast of characters including John Gotti, Woody Allen, Bernie Madoff, Mark David Chapman, Bill Cosby, Susan Smith, and Tom Brady, and with smart commentary on technique, Rosenberg delivers stories for every true-crime buff—and aspiring courtroom artist.

A revealing look at an often-overlooked aspect of the legal system.