family of guy rowe

These images are here because members of the family put them here. Most of these works are held in private collections, though a number of Guy’s paintings are at the Smithsonian and Angelo State University in Texas. This Web site is the closest we have to a complete catalog.

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If you have art by Guy, or pictures of any of his works not shown here, please contact us. Our goal is a complete record of Guy Rowe’s works.

Who Was Guy Rowe?

Guy, who signed most of his works as Giro, was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was born in Salt Lake City in 1894, and ended his formal schooling after the fifth grade, in order to work.

The family moved to Detroit, and Guy worked as a railroad baggage handler, newspaper seller, and tailor’s assistant. His stint in vaudeville as part of an acrobatic team led to his billing as “a boy wonder” for his chalk drawings. There were other jobs, too: he worked in a car factory in Detroit, was a lumberjack in Oregon.

Guy studied at the Detroit School of Fine Arts under John P. Wicker from 1912 to 1919, with a break in the army from 1918 to 1919. His first job in New York was doing still life paintings for the National Biscuit Co.

Guy best known for his 32 biblical paintings for the book, In Our Image, and for his 85 portraits for Time magazine. He was active as an artist for 45 years, constantly experimenting with new techniques and media, including encaustic printing and grease printing.

Corinn Rowe, Guy’s wife, is known for her drawings of Greek heads and ruins, encaustic flower prints, street scenes, landscapes, and psychiatric paintings in oil. She has one or more works in 116 individual collections, and in the Library of Congress.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Chris Rowe, Dick Rubinstein, Joel Rubinstein, Diane Citti, Allison Rubinstein Levy, and Eric Kurtz for their assistance in producing this site.