Roskill was born on November 10, 1933 in London, United Kingdom; the son of Stephen W. and Elizabeth C. H. (Van den Bergh) Roskill.
Mark's passion for art history might have been preordained. His father was the official naval historian, and his mother - one of the first women to be trained at the Slade, painted and collected painting throughout her life.
Roskill came to the United States in 1959.
Roskill received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1956 and a Master of Arts degree in 1961 from Cambridge University. In 1957, he earned his Master of Arts degree from Harvard University. Also in 1961, Mark was given a Master of Fine Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton University.
Roskill began his career as an instructor of the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University in 1959. Two years later he took the same position at Harvard University. Then in 1963, Mark was appointed an assistant professor at that university. In 1968, he became an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts. In 1972 Roskill became a professor at the same university.
His publications ranged across a wide front. He began with a PhD on 16th century Venetian art theory, but went on to embrace other fields: English painting from 1500 to 1869 (1959); the Impressionists (1969); Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images, which looked at photography as well as art (1983); Cubism (1985); Klee and Kandinsky (1992); and the Languages of Landscape (1997). His first novel, Loosestrife, is set in the Paris art scene at the start of the 20th century.
(Mark Roskill employs a new approach to understanding West...)
1996(Renaissance Society of America reprint texts.)
1968In 1959, Mark Roskill married Deidre L. Toller, with whom he divorced in 1973. They have three children. In 1974, he married Nancy Lee Muench.
