Vassar, she enrolled in the Art Students League of New York where she worked with artist Victoria Hutson Huntley, Mabel Dwight, Harry Sternberg, and George C. Miller. Career and works Rose focused her paintings on African American life on the Chesapeake Bay. Rose and her family had long supported civil rights for African American people and they were well connected with black artists and performers, including Paul Robeson, Lead Belly, and Roland Hayes. Rose's subjects included local descendants of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ross Tubman, a professional sail maker, female crab pickers, and heroic WWII veterans. She portrayed her friends with "dignity and compassion" which was rare in portrayals of people of color during that era. In 1937, when she was living in Caldwell, New Jersey, she was awarded the Mary Hills Goodwin Prize at the exhibition of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in New York City for her painting "The Twilight Quartet," a portrait of four African American musicians from the historic settlement of Copperville, Maryland. In 1957 she was awarded a prize in the graphics category at the exhibition of the National Association of Women Artists. Rose had a deep regard for African American spirituals. As early as 1956, she was credited by Howard University's Professor James A. Porter, the father of African American art history, for her representation of African American spirituals which he commended her for as being the most compassionate and complete to date. Her ear was moved by their dissonant beauty, and she created illustrations of the songs reflecting how members of her congregation felt as they sang the melodies. Alain LeRoy Locke selected two of her African American spirituals for his pioneering work, The Negro in Art in 1940. Her biographers, Barbara Paca and Nina Khrushcheva, have connected her writing and depiction of African American spirituals to the earliest foundation of African American religion in the United States. Ruth Starr Rose's works have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and throughout Europe. She was included in the 1947 and the 1951 Dallas Museum of Fine Arts exhibitions of the National Serigraph Society. Personal In 1914, Rose married William Searls Rose, who was from a wealthy family. They lived near New York City and adopted two children. They spent summers at Hope House and at the adjoining farm,