David Rose, 95; Artist’s Depictions of Famous Trials Were Seen by Millions Around World

During a rich career as a courtroom artist, David Rose viewed himself as a witness to history, using colored markers, pencils and ink to share the drama and emotion of trials with an audience of millions. The way he saw it, a camera could not have done it better.

“The camera sees everything, but captures nothing,” Rose told The Times in 1986. “It merely gets everything in the room. We learn to leave out the nonessential and emphasize what is important.”

Rose, whose varied career took him inside fine art galleries and to a long list of famous trials, died March 4 at his home in Hollywood. He was 95. The cause of death was thought to be complications from pneumonia, said his daughter, Lisa Rose.

In an era that has seen the video camera transformed into a household appliance and the creation of an array of such image-capturing gadgets as cellphones, Rose belonged to a dying profession. He was among a small circle of courtroom artists that seems to lose standard-bearers with each passing year.

“He’s one of the old-timers of the courtroom art world,” said Steven Grossfeld, a friend and agent. “Unfortunately, there are so few of them left.... He was someone they emulated.”

Rose’s portfolio is a pictorial history of notorious defendants: Klaus Barbie, Patty Hearst, Sirhan Sirhan, members of the Manson family.

The artist was born in Malden, Mass., on March 10, 1910, to immigrants who had moved to this country to escape persecution under Russian czars. The language of his home was what he once called “a spicy Lodzer Yiddish.” The sights, sounds and culture of his Boston neighborhood found their way onto his canvas, part of what became a lifelong devotion to Jewish themes.

In his hands, art was never a leisurely endeavor. It was reportage, commentary, history.

Rose’s formal study of art began in the 1930s. He studied in Haifa, Israel, and at the School of Music and Fine Arts in Boston. In 1934, he graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art.

“To put bread on the family table, I used my raw art-school skills in the advertising agencies of Boston and New York,” Rose wrote. “Then, on to the film and television factories of Hollywood.”

Over the years, Rose worked at a long list of studios: Disney, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Lisa Rose said. He worked as an animator, a layout artist, a publicity artist, an art director, an illustrator and a designer.

During World War II, Rose was a sergeant in the Army unit that created training and propaganda films.

The unit included Hollywood filmmakers, including Frank Capra and John Huston, who contributed their knowledge of filmmaking to the war effort. Theodor Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss, was Rose’s superior officer and a lifelong friend, Grossfeld said.

One night after his service in the war, Rose attended a dance in Los Angeles and met Ida Claire Shapiro, the woman who would become his wife.

“The story I heard was ... she came up and sat on his lap,” Lisa Rose said. “He couldn’t refuse. She had her eye on him.”

The two married in August 1945 and spent the next decades living and creating together. Ida Rose was an artist, known for her fiber sculpture and long tenure teaching art at Fairfax High School. The couple had two daughters. Rose’s wife and a daughter, Marsha Rose-Shea, died before he did. A memorial service will be held for Rose on Sunday at noon at Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles.

Art offered Rose a passport to travel around the world.

Before the birth of Israel, he was there on a kibbutz, drawing sketches of people working in the field. After independence, he drew images of the nation’s early settlers.

Rose, who carried the memory of family members killed during the Holocaust, sought “the Jewish experience worldwide,” including the sites of former concentration camps and the trail of the inquisition in Spain and Mexico. One work depicts a scene of German Jewish refugees being turned away at the Swiss border in 1938.

“It would be very difficult to pigeonhole him,” said Lisa Rose, his only survivor. “He did everything.... For a visual artist, I don’t think you could ask for more.”

The dignity of work, the simple act of earning one’s keep, was also a recurring theme in Rose’s art. He traveled to rock quarries, swamplands, orange groves and fields to capture images of workers. Once, he spent weeks on the high seas, sketching sailors on container ships, then went to ports to draw longshoremen, “all still doing proud, meaningful work in an increasingly automated society,” he wrote. In Los Angeles he sketched subway builders.

But the courtroom provided some of the most exciting and meaningful experiences of his career. In courtrooms where judges barred cameras, Rose and other artists were present. Rose viewed his job as that of any other reporter, but his tools were colored pencils, sketch pads and ink. The work required talent, speed and the ability to see beyond the surface.

“He tried his best to capture the emotions that ran in the courtroom and convey that, so that when it was reported on television

Rose began his court career in 1973 with the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who released the Pentagon Papers, regarding the Vietnam War, to the New York Times.

During the 1984 drug trial of automaker John Z. DeLorean, Rose not only documented the courtroom scene, he influenced the attire of one witness, DeLorean’s wife, Cristina Ferrare.

“Toward the close of one day in court, I was drawing her, and she was wearing one of those high-style dresses with a definite pattern,” Rose told The Times in 1986. “I wasn’t done with the drawing and I wouldn’t have remembered it enough to finish it. So I asked her, ‘Please, Cristina, would you wear the same dress tomorrow so I can finish my drawing? She said yes, and she did.”

Over the years, millions of viewers saw Rose’s work on television news broadcasts and in newspapers. His fine art was displayed in local galleries. One of his last exhibited pieces depicts the sorrow of Israeli and Palestinian mothers.

Rose was always full of energy and “was never at a loss for words,” said friend and fellow courtroom artist Bill Robles. “He lived, ate and breathed art ... both the courtroom and the fine art.”

He also was deeply concerned about the state of affairs nationally and internationally and had asked that donations be made toward efforts to defeat the Bush administration and its agenda, Lisa Rose said.

In December, Rose was stricken with pneumonia and never fully recovered, his daughter said. The illness took him from the drawing table but not from art. He would lie in bed, eyes closed, hands up as if drawing in the air, she said. Art for him, he once said, was what religion was for others.

Rose lived long enough to see his courtroom work viewed as art, fetching as much as $2,000 apiece. Collectors view the original pieces as moments of history, depicted through the eyes of someone who was there.

“The cameras were barred,” Rose wrote, “but I was witness.”