THE “SOCIALITE” WHOSE ART CELEBRATES THE LIFE OF EASTERN SHORE AFRICAN AMERICANS BACK IN THE DAY

The story of Ruth Starr Rose is full of bold and interesting turns. Born in the Midwest in 1887, she moved to the Eastern Shore at twentyish years old when her parents bought a dilapidated wreck of a mansion called Hope House in Talbot County. The place was chock full of history—members of the Lloyd and Tilghman families had called it home in the 1700s—but by the time the Roses arrived in 1907 it was falling apart and open to the elements.

Ruth’s mother, May, joked early on that her husband had gone out and bought an estate that amounted to one solid staircase, the rest of it junk. The Roses are the reason Hope House is still standing today—they brought in top area craftsmen and apparently paid uncommon attention to historic and architectural detail in bringing the place back to life.

Rose’s family background was quite cultured. Her father was a bigwig in the timber industry. Her mother wrote a two-volume book about Caribbean gardens. She had an uncle who was an accomplished archaeologist. Ruth herself went to college at Vassar.

What she did in the years that followed was take a longstanding family interest in far-away cultures and focus it on a culture close to home on the Eastern Shore, painting scenes from the daily lives of black folks. That made her a very unusual artist at the time. Some of the people who didn’t quite know what to make of Rose ended up dismissing her as a “white socialite” lightweight.

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