Rosa Margaret Curtis (1894-1960)

Rosa Margaret Curtis, the daughter of Lindsay Cole and Anna Rach (Fox) Parker, immigrated to the United States with her parents in the early 1900's.  After presumably settling in Silver City, New Mexico, about 1906 (place and date not fully documented), she went to England and received her education at the Convent of the Cross, Boscombe, Bournemouth, and the Ursuline Convent, Greenwich, and studied art at South Kensington School, London.

Subsequently following her return to New Mexico, she settled in Santa Fe (1916). Except for later travels, including a trip to England in 1927 after her marriage to Fayette Curtis the previous year, she thereafter remained mostly a resident of the city.  First as Daisy Parker, then Daisy Curtis, and finally Rose, or Rosa Curtis, she produced many paintings with western themes.

In the early 1920's, her exhibited works included Goat Corral; Tesuque; and Wood Vendors; and later Burros; Range Horses; Shiprock; and the Monument Valley, Utah.

Her most consuming interest, particularly from the 1940's on, however, was painting Native American's, most notably the Navajo Indians.  In 1935 she exhibited four canvases of Native American life at the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe.  In 1947 her paintings there included Navajo encampment scenes.

In the following years, she showed more Navajo studies, evoking from the Santa Fe New Mexican the comment that her "interest has become entirely absorbed by the subject of the reservation" and its environs.  The same theme highlighted her one-person exhibition at the museum in 1953.

Curtis, whose last permanent residence was in Santa Fe, also exhibited in shows of the National League of American Pen Women.