Guy Rose

Guy Rose was one of the few California painters who learned Impressionism at its source rather than second hand. He studied in Paris, exhibited at the Salon, and spent years at Giverny where he knew Monet, though the two were not close.

Lead poisoning from his paints forced him to stop working for a period in the 1890s, and he supported himself through illustration in New York before returning to France. He came back to California permanently in 1914 and painted the coast at Carmel, Laguna and the Monterey cypress groves.

The French pictures and the Californian ones use the same broken colour and high tonal key, which is what makes his work sit slightly apart from his West Coast contemporaries. A stroke ended his painting in 1921. The productive Californian period lasted barely seven years.