
This week I had the awesome opportunity to interview the last living model in Winold Reiss’ rotunda mural at the Museum Center, Roland Johnson. He’s 92 and lives in Cincinnati and has a great story about his first and last model experience. He was 16 months old at the time, living with his parents, Norwegian immigrants, in Brooklyn’s Norwegian Bay Ridge Community, which by 1940 had 55,000 Norwegian immigrants and was the largest Norwegian city outside of Oslo.
In 1932, Roland’s mother, Solvieg Olsen Johnson, went to a party of a friend of hers in Brooklyn, where she met Winold Reiss. He was nearly two years into the design of the murals and said he was looking for a baby with a fair complexion to model for his murals in Cincinnati. She told Reiss she had a 16 month old son so Reiss told her to bring him down to his studio at 108 W. 16th Street between 6th and 7th avenues in artsy Greenwich Village.
The City had just repossessed Reiss of his first studio at 5 Christopher Street, to be used as a first aid center for the independent Subway. The new location on 16th had been a former Butler Grocery warehouse and needed a lot of renovation, but he had just received payment from the Great Northern Railway for his Blackfeet Indian portraits for their calendars to promote Glacier Park tourism. Reiss would incorporate three of his Blackfeet friends in the rotunda mural – Turtle, Chief Middle Rider, and George Bull Child. The gallery was teaming with people, artists models, musicians and Bohemian friends of Reiss’. There would even occasionally be students sketching a nude model from life.
So, armed with a blonde wig (Roland had ) and a white dress his mother bought for a dollar, Roland started his modeling career. He modelled five days and received $4 a day. Reiss did a profile closeup sketch of Roland, and then a sketch of Roland being held by a Norwegian immigrant friend of his mother’s. That friend is holding Roland as a pioneer woman in the rotunda mural. She moved back to Norway and Roland never met her nor did his mother ever tell him that friend’s name so she is lost to history.



Reiss’ brother Hans had moved from Baden Germany to Sweden in 1914 before the war, because he was a pacifist, like Winold was. Reiss visited him in 1923 to paint a series of portraits of Swedish peasants. It’s somewhat possible that the friend of Roland’s mother who he posed with was somehow part of this association with the Reiss brothers.


Above images: Reiss’s Swedish portrait series
Roland’s mother came from a large family of nine kids from a poor suburb just east of Oslo, Norway. Her father was a blacksmith. She came to Brooklyn at age 17 sponsored by an older sister. She became a maid for another large immigrant family, the Johnsons, which is where she met Roland’s father. He was an electrical engineer who worked for the New York Bell Telephone Company. He had the great experience of having wonderful offices at the Rockefeller Center and the New York Museum of Natural History. His father, Roland’s grandfather , Harald Julius Johnson, was a commercial artist.
Reiss’ brother Hans, a sculptor himself, would create the lifesized scale drawings from the colored portrait Reiss made of the models. Then the Ravenna Mosaic company in St. Louis would glue the colored tiles to a thick paper backing and send them to Cincinnati for Reiss to supervise them being laid in the stucco for the murals. The project took Reiss 2 years to complete from his winning the job in 1930 and he was paid $21,000 for the project. Originally, the architects had planned for the murals to be done on canvas. But Reiss suggested mosaic murals and suggested halving his fee so that the rest could be applied to the project. To save money (the Crash of the Depression had just happened) Reiss also designed only the human figures in mosaic and the background was completed in colored stucco to save money. Reiss said that the colored tiles could be easily cleaned by just a wet wipe down and the brilliant colors could be maintained.
I of course asked Roland what Norwegian dishes he remembers his mother making growing up. He said he had a buddy who loved coming over to his house because his mother would make smorgasboard boards of Norwegian cheeses like Nokkelost, Gamalost, Geitost, pickles, fish, and meat pies with sour cream based dough called Lihamurekepiiras. She also made Farikal, the traditional cabbage and lamb stew that Roland said he was not fond of. But she also made Norwegian cakes, like Julekake ( a Christmas bread with cardamom), and Krumkake a Norwegian waffle cookie shaped like a cone, traditionally filled with cream served with lingonberry jam.



Nokkelost means key cheese and is a mild semi soft cheese with unique flavors of caraway seeds, cumin and cloves, sometimes called kuminost. Geitost is a brown goats milk cheese that tastes and has the texture of caramel. The third cheese he remembers, Gamalost is buried in the ground to age and is a course and pungent cheese, kind of like the German Limburger cheese.
Roland himself studied at Brooklyn Technical High School and Pratt Institute and became an industrial designer. In the 1960s Roland moved to Cincinnati for his job, and his mother reminded him of his early modeling job for the Union Terminal murals. He eventually went there and saw his image in the murals for the first time in his life. At the 75th anniversary of the murals, the Museum Center rented him a lift and he was lifted up next to his image so he could touch himself on the mural.
Roland’s mother lived to be 102 and he aspires to do the same. I do believe he has a good decade ahead of him, but he’s already immortal.