Wright Auction

American painter Charles Rosen was born in 1878 in Reagantown, Pennsylvania, but he later made Woodstock, New York his home for the majority of his life. He initially pursued a career in photography, capturing haunting images throughout the coal mining region of West Newton, Pennsylvania. Upon moving to New York City in 1898, Rosen had the ambition of becoming a newspaper illustrator, but he ended up shifting his focus to painting. Rosen's artistic education was enriched by luminaries such as Francis Coates Jones at the National Academy of Design and William Merritt Chase and Frank DuMond at the New York School of Art.

Rosen's passion for landscape painting was ignited during DuMond's outdoor classes in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1902. Rosen married Mildred Holden in 1903 and they settled near New Hope, Pennsylvania for nearly seventeen years. Rosen gained recognition for his expansive snowscapes, often drawing comparisons to Edward Willis Redfield, a prominent Pennsylvania Impressionist residing in New Hope. Among Rosen's close friends were artists like William Langson Lathrop, with whom he later co-founded "The New Hope Group," along with Daniel Garber and John Fulton Folinsbee. Similar to Redfield, Rosen summered in coastal Maine in the 1910s and executed several striking seascapes there. Despite being one of the foremost Pennsylvania Impressionists associated with the New Hope art colony, Rosen would soon feel compelled to change his style dramatically in response to various international art movements.

In 1920, Rosen moved with his family back to Woodstock, New York and adopted a Cubist-realist style known as Precisionism. He later founded the Woodstock School of Painting in 1922, taught periodically in Ohio, and created Depression-era murals in post offices in the 1930s. In the early 1940s, Rosen was briefly the director of the Witte Museum School of Art in San Antonio, Texas, but he suffered a heart attack in 1942 and moved back to New York not long after to concentrate of drawings and small pastels. Rosen passed away in 1950 in Kingston, New York at the age of seventy-two. Today works by Rosen are part of the collections of various institutions in America, including at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, west of New Hope.