Born March 11, 1884, in Richmond, Virginia, Rohland was the fourth of seven sons of Clara Marie and Otto Friedrich Rohland. At the age of 14 he went to work as a photo engraver for the Christopher Engraving Company in Richmond. He studied in evening art classes at the Virginia Mechanics Institute under the painter and illustrator Wm. L. Sheppard, and the artist and lithographer, Richard A. Duckhardt. In 1900 his family moved to Philadelphia where he worked as a copper etcher for Beck's Engraving. From 1902 to 1906, he lived in New York and continued his evening art studies under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art and at the Art Students League, where he won a prize in the League's "Fakir's Exhibition." Then, with an aunt's financial help, he was able to complete several years of formal art studies in France. Returning to New York in 1909, he studied illustration under at the League, and took classes with Henri at the Lincoln Arcade. He also took landscape painting withBirge Harrison at the Art Students League's summer school in the Woodstock, NY, art colony founded in 1902 by Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Hervey White, and Bolton Brown. Twenty-four artists associated with the colony exhibited in the legendary Armory Show of 1913, which featured 1,300 works of art. Rohland entered three paintings and sold one. Later that year, Rohland showed his work at the MacDowell Club of New York and the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition. In 1919 he married Caroline Speare, a Woodstock colleague and fellow participant in the colony's lively Maverick Festivals. The couple maintained a home and a large, impressive garden in Woodstock where they grew the flowers that Rohland used in his floral oils and watercolors. In search of subjects for their art work, the couple often traveled to Europe, Puerto Rico, and southern and western states. They lived in New York City for short periods, but Woodstock remained their major residence for many years. There, Peter A. Juley & Son included both of them in their photographic documentation of early 20th-century American painters. The Rohlands' careers were linked until their marriage ended with his death in 1949.
Style
Like other art colonies, Woodstock fostered artistic collaboration. Throughout Rohland's life, the colony's artists and artist couples, Andrew Dasburg and his wife, Grace Mott Johnson, Florence and Konrad Cramer, Henry McFee, Emil Ganso, Peggy Bacon, Eugene and Elsie Speicher, and many others were among their close and instructive friends. In 1920, when Speicher took Albert C. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation, on a tour of Woodtock artists' studios, Barnes bought five of Rohland's monotypes. Barnes later wrote Rohland, saying the works "successfully competed in cheerfulness and charm with a bright, crisp day. By the early 1920's, Rohland, like other Woodstock artists, was depicting the local landscape in heavy brushstrokes and earthy tones, which some newspaper reviews called "modernism." However, Rohland's watercolors remained bright and fluid. Local landscape painter and art writer, John Slusser, wrote of Rohland's floral oils and watercolors, "only a temperament as native to the sun and the soil as the flowers themselves could have produced them." Printmaking was a signature art form in Woodstock. Rohland contributed prints to Hervey White's publication, The Plowshare, as well as to Woodstock's satirical publication, Hue and Cry.
Later career and legacy
Rohland exhibited regularly with the Woodstock Artists Association, Society of Independent Artists, Salons of America, the Carnegie Institute, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He also had one-man shows, notably in 1939 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. When Rohland traveled for his work, Juliana Force, who would become the first director of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, handled many of his exhibitions and sales through the Whitney Studio Club and Whitney Gallery, where Rohland began exhibiting in 1927. He showed at the Whitney Museum's first Biennial in 1932. He continued to participate in Whitney Museum exhibitions through 1942. The Great Depression severely affected his art sales, but Rohland managed to secure three commissions from the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts for post office murals. He executed , for Mount Union, PA, ; , for Decatur, GA ; and , for Ville Platte, LA. In 1942, Rohland's chronic asthma worsened, and the couple packed up their Ford Model T and left Woodstock, traveling south to Washington, DC, with their final destination Santa Fe, New Mexico, where other Woodstock artists, among them, Andrew Dasburg and John Sloan, were active. From 1942 to 1945, Rohland exhibited yearly in the annual exhibition of Painters and Sculptors of the Southwest; hence, he is often considered a "western" artist. In El Palacio, August 1943, Edgar Lee Hewett remarked that Rohland's watercolor, , "possesses solidity beneath the flickering splashes of color. The drawing is in accord with the short-hand nature of this most difficult of mediums." In 1945, finding Santa Fe too cold, Rohland and his wife moved to Sierra Madre, CA, where he painted mountain landscapes and worked on his engravings. Rohland died in Los Angeles, September 29, 1949. Many references erroneously give his death date as 1953.
