Art collector and museum founder Rene di Rosa dies

The nationally known di Rosa collection includes some 2,200 works of art, including early work by the “Funk Movement” sculptors who came out of UC Berkeley and UC Davis in the early 1960s.

“Rene’s great focus was collecting the work of artists from the Bay Area and greater Bay Area,” said Steve Oliver, who maintains his own collection of work by internationally known artists at his ranch near Geyserville.

“That provided an enormous amount for artists who otherwise wouldn’t have been recognized or honored the way they were,” said Oliver, a former longtime board member and chairman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The di Rosa collection includes irreverent, rule-breaking work by internationally known Bay Area artists including Robert Arneson, Richard Shaw and William T. Wiley, as well as Robert Hudson of Cotati and David Best, who lives near Petaluma.

“There was a core group of artists that Rene was devoted to,” said Michael Schwager, a curator at di Rosa until last year.

“Part of the legend of Rene’s beginnings as an art collector was his studying viticulture at UC Davis and meeting Arneson” and other artists on campus, said Schwager, an art professor and gallery director at Sonoma State University.

Despite his status in the art world during his later life, di Rosa remained informal and independent, Schawager said.

“He was quirky. He wore blue workshirts and string ties,” Schwager said. “He always had a twinkle in his eye.”

Di Rosa was born May 14, 1919, in Boston. He was the only son of Maude Cupples Scudder and Italian Consul Gustavo di Rosa.

He graduated from Yale University, where he served as editor of the Yale Daily News. After serving in the US Navy, di Rosa moved to Paris, where time spent on the Left Bank sparked his lifelong admiration for artists.

In the 1950s, he settled in San Francisco, where he worked as a reporter for the Chronicle and became familiar to the artists of the North Beach neighborhood.

In 1960, Di Rosa purchased 460 acres in the southern Napa Valley, an area eventually given the Carneros appellation. He sold grapes to such premium wine producers as Mondavi and Sterling before selling his Winery Lake Vineyards to Seagram in the late 1980s.

Di Rosa retained more than 200 acres, protecting 163 acres and setting up a foundation to develop and support the 85-acre di Rosa Preserve, as it was originally known. It was opened to the public in 1997.

Now called simply di Rosa, the property serves as a permanent home to his collection, some displayed outdoors, including a sculpture garden. The rest is housed in four buildings, including di Rosa’s former home and the Gatehouse gallery near the entrance to the grounds.

In 1974, di Rosa married Veronica Pridham McDonald, a Canadian-born painter and sculptor who shared his passion for art and helped fill their Napa Valley home with artwork, which is now part of the permanent collection.

Veronica died in 1991, but di Rosa continued to live on the property. Last year, he moved into Napa where he could receive daily care, Schwager said.

The cause of death was Lewy Body Dementia, a rare progressive brain disease, a spokesperson for the di Rosa museum said.

Di Rosa is survived by first cousin Rosalie Ewing of St. Louis, Mo., and stepchildren Andrea Flaa of Vancouver, B.C. and Jock McDonald of Pasadena.

Services will be private, but a public celebration of his life and legacy at di Rosa is being planned, with the date to be announced. Donations to the di Rosa museum and park may be mailed to di Rosa, 5200 Sonoma Highway, Napa, CA 94559.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. See his ARTS blog at http://arts.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.