Charles Rosen [1878-1950]
America
Quarry sunset, ca.1916.
Oil on board
14-1/2 x 17 inches
Signed at lower right : ‘CHARLES ROSEN’.

Charles Rosen [1878-1950] biography:

An Impressionist and modernist experimenting with Cubism, Charles Rosen applied this style and other European innovations to typical American subjects. He did numerous snow scenes and was especially drawn to industrial and marine scenes including factories, barges, and mills along the Hudson and Delaware rivers. He is best remembered as a second-generation member of the New Hope Impressionist School and a long-time resident of the Woodstock Art Colony.

He was born in Reagantown, Pennsylvania and at age sixteen ran a photography studio in West Newtown, Pennsylvania. In 1898, he began an illustration career in New York City and studied with Francis Coates Jones at the National Academy of Design. He also studied at the New York School of Art with William Merritt Chase and with Frank Vincent DuMond, whom he later followed to Old Lyme Connecticut, a colony of impressionist painters. It was there that he developed an interest in landscape painting.

In 1903, he married Mildred Holden, and they moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania in Bucks County about forty miles north of Philadelphia, and in 1916, he began exhibiting with fellow artists there, called “The New Hope Group,” including Daniel Garber and Edward Redfield. In 1918, he went to the Woodstock Art Colony at age forty to teach landscape painting in summer school in the Art Students League program, and by 1920 he had settled in Woodstock. In 1922, he and Henry Lee McFee and Andrew Dasburg founded their own school of art, the Woodstock School of Painting.

He lived primarily in Woodstock until his death in Kingston, New York in 1950 with the exception of several years in Texas. In 1940, Charles Rosen worked in San Antonio, Texas as director of the Witte Memorial Museum School of Art to replace Henry McFee, who had resigned. He remained until the school closed in 1942, but then became director for of the Koogler McNay Art Institute in San Antonio.

He was an elected member of the National Academy of Design and The National Arts Club, and his work is in many collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, and the City Art Museum in St. Louis. His painting, Winter Sunlight, won the Altman Gold Medal and the Inness Gold Medal at the National Academy of Design in 1917.