"Harris (Harry) Rodvogin was born in London in 1897, the child of Polish immigrant parents. In 1900, the Rodvogin family moved to the United States, settling in Hartford. There Harry, his brother, and two sisters grew up living over the family grocery, and there he began to paint.

“Harry Rodvogin's first art lessons came from Thomas Thurber, a teacher at the Goodwill Neighborhood House. While still a young boy in Hartford, Harry painted a stirringly beautiful portrait of his sister. 

“Formal art lessons followed, by means of scholarships to the Hartford Art Society, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and the New York Art Students League. In Pennsylvania, he studied with the noted Quaker landscape painter Daniel Garber, and showed such potential that he was permitted to skip there requisite courses in charcoal work and basic sculpting. When he left for New York, it was as a visit on his way home to Hartford. Instead, he stayed for 37 years.

 

“Writing in Connecticut Artists in 1980, Vincent Condon describes the milieu Harry Rodvogin settled into:

 "To be living in Greenwich Village in the 20's was the dream of any young artist ... . It was the boom town of the new movement known as 'modernism.' Old values were being questioned. New lifestyles were being formed. Something fresh and exciting was in the air, and even if the circumstances of daily life were at times rather harsh there was always one's art and one's friends to keep the wolves at bay."

 

“Harry lived the life style of the (almost literally) starving artist, but there were other types of riches: his professional and personal relationships with some of the most important, innovating artists of the time. George Luks of "The Eight" was his teacher; his friends included Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, Robert Henri, and Arshile Gorky.

 

“Commercial art and photography supported Harry Rodvogin, his wife, and family in the 30's and until World War II, when Harry enlisted, at age 45, in the naval air corps. He became an aerial photographer, spending most of the war years with Admiral Halsey in New Caledonia. When it was over, he returned to a simple life in New York, painting and drawing for Time, Life, the New York Times, and a host of other newspapers and magazines, while living over-a-Chinese restaurant which gave him room and board in return for odd jobs.

 

“In 1954, Harry Rodvogin made the move to New London at the urging of William Ronnick, owner of the Lighthouse Inn and an art collector. From that time until the devastating Inn fire of 1979, -which destroyed many major pieces, the artist lived and worked at the Inn. Many of his New London admirers have paintings from this period of his career.”