For more than two decades, Christine Lemarié and her sister, Dominque, sat in Maryland courtrooms for WBAL-TV and WJZ-TV to capture scenes from trials for the evening news. Cameras were not allowed in Maryland courtrooms — they are still prohibited — so it was left to the Lemarié sisters, immigrants from France, and their talented colleagues — Art Lien, Beth Otter and Betsy Kirk — to sketch from the front row of the galleries (and sometimes an empty jury box) to give television viewers a sense of the scene in trials of all types, from homicides to political corruption cases. Charlie Hazard was sometimes dispatched to courtrooms to sketch scenes for The Sun in pen and ink.
It was art on the run, deadline work, moments of real human drama captured on paper. I first met Christine and Dominique at the 1977 extortion trial of a state delegate, George Santoni, who had been nabbed in an undercover FBI investigation. Christine kept many of her drawings, and many of them appear on this just-produced YouTube video:
More drawings appear on this page, just to offer a few samples. Christine’s work covers a period from the 1970s, through the 1980s. With the approach of my new play, “Baltimore Docket,” we are highlighting the deadline art of Christine Lemarié because much of her work covers the same period of time referenced in the play.
These drawings are all for sale. If, while watching the video, you recognize someone — a judge, juror, witness, defendant or attorney — and wish to purchase the original, make a screen shot of the image or note the time the image appears in the video, and contact me at djrodricks@gmail.com
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