Roderick Dempster MacKenzie
Roderick MacKenzie was raised and educated in Mobile, Alabama. He studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and later at the Chapu and the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he was a student of Constant, Laurens, and Jules Lefebvre.
In 1913, after spending twenty years in India, MacKenzie returned to Mobile. He painted a series of pictures of the steel works at the Tennessee Coal and Iron plants at Ensley and Westfield near Birmingham, Alabama, finding “beauty, strength, and majesty in modern industry.” Most of the works from this series were executed in pastel, but a small handful were done in oil as well. The pastels from the series were exhibited by the American Iron and Steel Institute at the Hotel Commodore in New York in May 1923.