The line of cars rumbles down a long road, covered in pine needles and shaded by towering trees, before stopping at a magnificent brick mansion with walls blanketed in ivy. Here, seven passengers alight and follow a regal, blond woman inside. She hustles them through the drawing room and a library lined with wood bookcases, then outside onto a wide porch with a breathtaking view of lapping water leading to the Chesapeake Bay. “Oh wow, look at that,” one woman murmurs. Cicadas hum in the July heat and the fragrance of mint from the garden fills the air as the guests sit in wicker chairs.
The group—which includes the former chair of the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture and an expert in African-American spirituals—has come to tour Hope House, a plantation just outside Easton on the Eastern Shore. The attraction is the home’s former resident, Ruth Starr Rose, a talented, yet little-known artist whose work is the subject of a major exhibition at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. It may seem odd for a museum dedicated to African-American culture to show work from a privileged, white woman, but Rose was always doing the unexpected. For subjects, she chose the African-American members of the Easton community—unheard of in the early 20th century.
“See that boat across the water?” Barbara Paca, the woman leading the tour, asks, pointing to a slip of land that appears over the narrow creek. “That was Ruth Starr Rose’s dock. She had her studio over there.”
Paca, a noted art historian and creative designer, curated the exhibit of Rose’s work, Ruth Starr Rose: Revelations of African American Life In Maryland and the World. It features portraits of crab pickers, sail makers, and heroic soldiers, some of whom were descendants of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, as well as bold depictions of spirituals. Rose captured those she called “her beautiful people” with an elegance and pride during an era of intense segregation and Jim Crow laws.
Her radical views could explain why she is not listed among other groundbreaking artists of her time. But Paca’s exhibit, which opened in October, aims to shed light on this unprecedented artist that history forgot.
“She gave strength to so many different people,” Paca says. “Ruth didn’t want to make the world more confused, she wanted to show universal brotherhood, to bring about a unity in races through paint.”
The exhibit coincides with the Lewis Museum’s 10th anniversary and is the first comprehensive showing of Rose’s work. “I’m overwhelmed with the similarities in tension between the time Rose lived and the atmosphere around civil rights now,” says the museum’s executive director A. Skipp Sanders. “This is an important story, and a perfect example of how art can capture history.”
Though Rose received accolades during her lifetime—with shows in Europe and New York and works in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian—critical acclaim eluded her.
“When her work is most compelling is when she was doing what she wanted to do.”
Keith Sheridan, an art dealer based in Myrtle Beach, SC, who sells Rose’s prints, said she put the male-dominated art world on edge. “She’s left out more because of her subject matter and style, which wasn’t something the art world recognized as progressive.”
To this day, Paca says, “male curators use terms like ‘saccharine’ to define her work, or ‘amateur,’ or ‘socialite.’” But she and others see Rose’s work differently. “There’s no doubt this woman is a first-class artist, and that she is every bit as good as her male counterparts. She was just shoved aside,” Paca says.
“There’s no pretense to her work,” Sheridan says. “She portrays these social issues in a format that’s heart-felt and natural.”
Though it took over 10 years to find support for the exhibit and gather Rose’s prints and paintings, their beauty and power has transfixed art patrons. And that has affirmed Paca’s belief that Rose’s story has a message that still needs to be heard.
It was 1906 and Rose was 16 when she and her family moved to Talbot County from Eau Claire, WI. The Starrs had purchased and refurbished the run-down, 17th-century plantation called Hope House, and set about constructing a lifestyle vastly different from their neighbors—one of equal dealings between blacks and whites.
William Starr had made a fortune in timber—he brought the wood for Hope House’s library bookcases from one of his mills. His family had been active abolitionists in Wisconsin, and while at Hope House, he and his wife, Ida May Hill Starr, entertained black guests as well as prestigious visitors such as President Woodrow Wilson, and brought black friends to the nearby country club. Ida May highlighted the work of African-American gardeners while writing for fashionable publications.
“These people were ahead of their time,” Paca says. “They had an integrated community here, and it made people very uncomfortable.”
Rose attended Vassar College, then enrolled in classes at the Art Students League of New York. In 1914, she married William Searls Rose, who was also from a wealthy family, and they settled outside New York City, and adopted two children. But they spent summers at Hope House, and at the adjoining farm, Pickbourne, which had been Rose’s wedding gift. Her wealth allowed her to pursue art, and the social activism she valued.
On the Eastern Shore, she raced log canoes, taught Sunday school in Copperville, and brought prestigious friends to visit, including author DuBose Heyward, best known for his novel that was adapted into the opera Porgy and Bess, and artist Prentiss Taylor, famed for his lithographs of Harlem life.
“She did everything in capital letters,” says granddaughter Brenda Rose. “She was not traditional by any means.”
Rose painted and sketched the people around her, in their homes and at work on the water, using bold colors and brushstrokes reminiscent of contemporaries Thomas Hart Benton and Georgia O’Keeffe. She illustrated the historic songs passed down through generations of slaves, depicting fiery flames and parting seas. Hers were the most comprehensive visual interpretations of spirituals in the United States, said noted Howard University professor James Amos Porter in 1956.