Of the numerous articles and reviews of Rose’s work, one of the most interesting essays praising him was written in jest and published in the Los Angeles Times, on January 14, 1923, under the pseudonym “Benjamin Blue.”  Benjamin Blue was in fact Luvena B. Vysekal (1873-1954), a fellow artist who authored a series of humorous essays she termed “Counterfeit Presentments.”  Please keep in mind that the Rose Parade has absolutely nothing to do with Guy Rose.

Over Pasadena way, there lives a painter, a Native Son, who is honored by his fellow citizens each New Year’s Day in a most appropriate manner.

So few communities really know how to pay tribute to their artists that Pasadena deserves credit for the pretty little innovation.  Each New Year’s Day, they gather billions of posies and strew them along the path this Native Son will tread the coming year.

This stupendous, spectacular, gigantic, elaborate and artistic tournament each New Year’s Day in his name should serve as an incentive to other communities, (Friends of American Art please take notice) on how to treat their favorite artist.

It’s a wonderful thing to be a Native Son of California!  It’s a wonderful thing to be an artist!  The combination of the two is an achievement worthy of all the traffic blocking it on occasions.  Next time I am cast in the role of an artist, I’m going to see to it that I am born in California.

As the recipient of this overwhelming adulation, his modesty is amazing.  But after all, if your fellow citizens do your boasting for you, and your neighboring city calls you on advisory committees, and your club bids you serve on art juries, and the newspapers quote you and reproduce your paintings every other Sunday, and the art dealers run after you, and the exhibitors invite you, and patrons buy you, it’s a trifling matter to be becomingly modest.

Only recently, I bought and read a book about this fellow-painter and his works.  It was gratifying to think that anyone had shown the good judgment to publish a book about one of us while he yet lived among you.

This fortunate son of California is no wayward child.  His delineations of his native hills and plains, the sea and sky that embrace them, are as full of love and tenderness as a most exacting parent could hope, and every mother’s son who loves her feels such a thrill of pride, that even we adopted children, who stand to one side and join in the chorus of “We love you, California,” do so with no spark of envy, we put real feeling into our part of the song.  We realize Californians can’t help boosting their own crop.

And he?  Well, all the honors that Paris heaped upon him couldn’t keep him long away from his own.  No doubt about its being a perfect affinity.

Vive le Californian!

 

The eventful year 1915 saw the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.  It was both the last great Impressionist show in America and the first major Impressionist exhibition in California.  The exposition brought to California the major figures of American Impressionism.  William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Edmund Tarbell (1862-1938), and Edward Redfield (1869-1965), among others, were given individual galleries to hang their works.  The Grand Prize of the exposition went to Frederick Frieseke (1874-1939), Rose’s friend and neighbor in Giverny, and the Medal of Honor to Willard Metcalf (1858-1925), a consummate Impressionist.

Nineteen-fifteen also marks the beginning of San Diego’s professional artist community.  In competition with San Francisco, San Diego likewise marked the opening of the Panama Canal with an exposition, the Panama-California Exposition, held in the newly constructed Balboa Park.  Only one exposition per year could use the designation “International” and San Francisco’s bid for the title was successful.  Both expositions were extended for the following year, creating a rich source of confusion for scholars and trivia aficionados.  In 1916, the “International” designation was in turn awarded to San Diego and the appellations were “Panama-Pacific Exposition” for San Francisco, and “Panama-California International Exposition” for San Diego.

While the shows in San Francisco and San Diego came too late to influence the established generation of Plein-Air painters, the impact of the expositions on younger California painters was tremendous and immediate.  Because of the public awareness of Impressionism at these fairs, the style stayed popular for another decade in California.  A group of young painters known as The Society of Six, who lived and painted in the San Francisco Bay area, were awed by the Impressionist displays and were stimulated to produce vivid and fresh plein-air scenes of their environs.

The Plein Air style continued to be popular in California until the end of the 1920s.  By that time, many of the key figures that had made the style the vibrant and dynamic phenomenon of earlier years had died or ceased to paint.  Moreover, the new generation of California artists, who had admired, sought out and trained under the Impressionists, had been lured into "new" styles, based on tenets and concepts of European Modernism.  The 1930s heralded change.  The Great Depression was an equal-opportunity affliction to all artists in California.  Modernists as well as Plein Air artists joined in the Works Progress Administration programs, such as the Federal Arts Project, which allotted mural commissions in public buildings.  With economic recovery, time and the caprices of taste made inroads.  By the outbreak of World War II, most of the prominent names of California Impressionism had died or had withdrawn from the public eye, and the style itself became a nostalgic souvenir of a bygone era.