Guy Rose, born in San Gabriel and a leading figure of the California Impressionist movement, spent much of his career in France. In 1904, he relocated to the village of Giverny, where he worked in a colony of American artists and befriended Claude Monet. Tamarisk Trees in Early Sunlight shows his debt to the French Impressionists in the translucent, blue-green colors and the fluid brushwork, emphasizing the sinuous, back-lit forms of the Tamarisk trees—a species that grew on Monet’s property. The graphic flatness and shallow picture plane of Rose’s composition may be a technique also borrowed from Japanese woodblock prints, a source for many French and American Impressionists. Like Rose, the Tamarisk was a transatlantic traveler; native to Eurasia and Africa, it was introduced to the Americas in the 1800s, where in many regions it is now considered an ornamental but invasive species.
