MS 317 - Carl Roters Collection, 1900-2005 | McCracken Research Library

The Carl Roters Collection (No. 317) is arranged into four series by intellectual type, as follows:

Outline of Series Arrangement

            Artwork– Box 1-6, Map Case Drawer 13, Oversize Box 1-5

            Biographical- Box 6-9, Oversize Box 6

            Correspondence-Box 10-14, Map Case Drawer 13, Oversize Box 6

            Oversize – Oversize Box 1-6, Map Case Drawer 13

            Photographs – Box 15-20

            Multimedia – Box 21-22

            2014 Addition - Box 23-24

Carl George Roters (1898-1989),

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1898, Carl G. Roters, at the age of fourteen apprenticed with renowned illustrator Edward A. Wilson.  He first worked as an advertising illustrator and freelance artist, then lecturer in Fine Arts at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.  In 1938, Roters produced a watercolor mural for Consolidated Edison’s New York World’s Fair exhibit (1,400 sq ft ‘the world’s largest water color painting’).  Other mural commissions followed notably for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the Hotel Syracuse, and the Marine Midland Trust Company of Syracuse, New York, and Monmouth College in Illinois.  In 1941 he married Ramona Morgan.  In 1946, Roters joined the faculty of the College of Fine Arts, Syracuse University, New York, teaching illustration and design.

In 1954-1955, he heard about a competition sponsored by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to paint historic murals for the Jackson Lake Lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, based on the theme “The Fur Traders and Trappers of the Early West”.  The competition brought Roters to the West for the first time.  He beat out four other artists, and won the competition in 1957.  Roters painted the murals in the basement of his Syracuse, NY home from 1957-1959.  He installed the “Rendezvous Murals”, in the Jackson Lake Lodge in 1959, where thousands of visitors to Grand Teton National Park now view them each year.  Roters spent every summer in Jackson until he retired from Syracuse University in 1964 and made Jackson Hole his home.  He focused on western subjects including trappers, traders, Indians, horses and striking Rocky Mountain landscapes which he called the ‘Rendezvous Collection’.