Iver Rose

1899 - 1972

Iver Rose was born in Chicago at the turn of the 19th century. His introduction to art was through a drawing class at Hull-House, one of this country's best known social settlements, which was established in 1889 in the heart of Chicago's densely populated Near West Side neighborhood. Rose received additional instruction at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cincinnati Academy of Art.

During the early 1920s, Rose moved to New York, where he found work as a commercial artist. When the Depression hit, he returned to Chicago and was employed for a time as an easel painter under the auspices of the WPA. Many of Rose's works dating from the 1930s and '40s have a social realism flavor about them, a concern for the plight of the working man. In the paintings Rose did here on Cape Ann (and particularly in Rockport), this shows up in his depictions of men laboring in the granite quarries and working in the fishing industry. Rose would later turn his focus to lighter subjects, most notably clowns and children.   

Iver Rose began summering in Rockport in the early 1930s. On his first visits to the area he found lodgings in a Main Street boarding house run by Jennie Savage, affectionately known as "the jungle."  In 1948, Rose purchased the property which overlooked Sandy Bay and continued to use it as his summer home and studio until his death in 1972.