Ruth Starr Rose (1887–1965) was an American artist. She was a painter, lithographer and serigrapher, and best known for her paintings of African American life in Maryland in the 1930s and 1940s. This important woman artist's work has toured throughout Maryland, the United States, and Europe as a unique example of an early American Shared Community expressed through pigment and paint. Additionally, Rose is credited as the first white artist to create a work of art for a black church. The subject of her fresco, Pharaoh's Army Got Drownded, was to honor the minister's son who perished in training for WWII. Early life and education Rose was born in 1887 into an affluent family in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Her family were active abolitionists; her paternal grandfather was William Starr, a timber businessman who had been placed under house arrest by U.S. Marshals for his refusal to comply with the fugitive slave laws. On her paternal side she was descended from Dr. Comfort Starr (1589–1659), one of the founders of Harvard College. Her mother was Ida May Hill Starr, an author and musician. Nathan Comfort Starr (1896–1981) a Medieval literature professor, was her brother, and her sister-in-law (married to Nathan) was photographer and art historian, Nina Howell Starr. The family moved to Maryland's Eastern Shore to Hope House after the turn of the century, in 1906. Hope House was in the Tilghman and Lloyd families and existed as a plantation, before the Starr family moved in. In 1907, the Starr family remodeled the home. The family lived differently than their neighbors, in a racially integrated community where they socialized with their African American neighbors and friends. In Maryland, she and her mother attended the African American DeShields United Methodist Church in Copperville, Maryland. Many years later, Rose painted a mural of the biblical story of Moses parting the Red Sea in this same church titled, And the Pharaoh’s Army Got Drowned (1940) and it served as a metaphor for breaking away from slavery. Nearby towns of Unionville and Copperville were African American communities, and often where Rose would spend time and paint her subjects. Rose was an art activist, and it was her familiarity with town residents that allowed her a glimpse into the African American experience. She left Hope House, the family property, to study, just as her mother had, at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. After graduation from