Guy Rose (1867-1925)

After almost thirteen years abroad, Guy Rose returned to America, first living in New York and Rhode Island, then returning to his home in Southern California in the fall of 1914.  By the time of his 1916 exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum, Rose’s reputation as an Impressionist painter was well established.  Reviewing this exhibition in the Los Angeles Times, the critic Antony Anderson wrote,  “He is a stronger painter today, you will admit--and a more American one, certainly a more western one. His recent pictures from La Jolla and Laguna Beach will tell you exactly what I mean....Charming as are the pictures from Giverny and Toulon, they have not the grasp on the solidities that we find in those from Laguna and La Jolla.  They are not so translucently poetic.  Perhaps the painter has always needed the sunlight of his boyhood” (Ilene Susan Fort, “The Cosmopolitan Guy Rose,” California Light, 1900-1930, Laguna Beach, California, 1900,  p. 106).

Following his one-person person exhibition, Rose departed for a seven week painting trip to Sierra Nevada, where he almost certainly executed Owens River, Sierra Nevada, California.  This same year, Richard Miller, an artist whom Rose had known well in Giverny, came to live in Pasadena.  Will South observes, “His presence no doubt provided both camaraderie and perhaps even a spirit of competition.  Though Miller’s stay in Southern California lasted only two years, Mabel Urmy Seares noted in 1917 that ‘his presence has been a great inspiration to a group of local painters who for several years have been in revolt against the use of the old palette in depicting this preeminently sunny climate’” (Guy Rose: American Impressionist, Oakland, California, 1995, p. 64). 

At the beginning of 1917, the Battery Gallery in Pasadena mounted an exhibition of Rose’s work, where a number of his paintings of Sierra Nevada were shown.  With its panoramic view of the Mountains, field of purple flowers and vast sky, this monumental canvas reveals Rose’s fascination with the California landscape.  Will South writes, “Rose’s art was not only modern to Southern Californian’s, it was sane.  It combined the traditional and recognizable values of accurate drawing and careful observation with what was for them the still wholly vanguard Impressionist aesthetic of light.  Rose’s painting offered clarity and order, two primary virtues subscribed to by his audience, at the same time as it described the sun-drenched and colorful California landscape in terms of a heightened sensuality.  His synthesis of technical prowess in paint with obvious lyric sensibilities represented to his viewers a just and reasonable balance between nature and poetry.  In short, for Southern Californians Guy Rose was the right artist in the right place at the right time; he materialized their shared attitudes and values about the land and how to live in it.  When understood metaphorically, his paintings of towering eucalypti and ocean shorelines confirmed California as a paradise of limitless resources in a country mythologized as the Land of Opportunity" (Will South, Guy Rose: American Impressionist, Oakland, California, 1995, p. 61).