Among the most talented of the early painters of Los Angeles, Guy Rose was also the closest to the style of the French impressionists. After attending high school in Los Angeles, Rose spent several years in San Francisco. There he studied with EMIL CARLSEN at the San Francisco Art Association’s School of Design, where he received several awards. In 1888 Rose went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. During his three years in France he visited Giverny, home of Claude Monet. He returned to the United States in 1891, landing in New York, where he became a successful illustrator and exhibited his paintings with the Society of American Artists. In 1893 he went back to Paris for additional study, and he won an honorable mention in the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in 1894. During a trip to Greece that summer he fell ill with lead poisoning caused by the white paint he used, so he was forbidden to paint for several years.
In 1895 Rose visited California for six months, then returned to New York, where he again worked as an illustrator, also teaching at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and conducting sketching classes in the country during the summer. In 1899 he and his wife returned to Paris, where he continued to work as an illustrator. He took trips to Algeria and Italy and also visited California again. Rose moved to Giverny in 1904, to a house and garden near those of Claude Monet (1840-1926). When he began painting again, he developed an impressionist style. He became close friends with American impressionists FREDERICK CARL FRIESEKE, Richard Miller (1875-1943), and Lawton Parker (1868-1954) and exhibited with them at the Madison Art Gallery in New York in 1910.
In 1912 Rose returned to the United States, exhibiting his paintings in New York at Macbeth Gallery and elsewhere. For two summers he painted and taught out-of-doors at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island. In 1914 he returned to California to stay. He lived in Pasadena and was an instructor and later director of the Stickney Memorial School of Art there. He won a bronze medal at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and in 1915 he won a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and a gold medal the same year at the PanamaCalifornia International Exposition in San Diego. He won the William Preston Harrison Prize awarded by the California Art Club at the Los Angeles Museum in 1921 and served as a member of the museum’s board of governors from 1915 to 1922. His painting was curtailed by a stroke he suffered in February 1921 and the resulting paralysis. The year following his death Stendahl Art Galleries in Los Angeles organized a memorial exhibition of his work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archiv. Am. Art, Stendahl Art Galleries Papers § Los Angeles, Stendahl Art Galleries, Guy Rose: A Biographical Sketch and Appreciation, Paintings of France and America, exh. cat., 1922, with essays by Antony Anderson and Earl L. Stendahl § Rose V. S. Berry, "A Painter of California," International Studio 80 (January 1925): 332-37 § Los Angeles, Stendahl Art Galleries, Catalogue of the Guy Rose Memorial, exh. cat., 1926, with essays by Peyton Boswell and Antony Anderson, entries by Boswell § Ilene Susan Fort, "The Cosmopolitan Guy Rose," in Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, Calif., and others, California Light, 1900-1930, exh. cat., forthcoming.
