''Sierra Vista Hill'', Southern California haystacks, signed lower right: Guy Rose, titled verso, titled again on a gum label affixed verso, oil on canvas, 23.75'' H x 28.75'' W, est: $200,000/300,000
Exhibited: Stendahl Memorial Exhibition, Los Angeles, CA, March 1926, no. 82. Note: Sierra Vista Hill was painted in the district of Sierra Vista, which is at the western boundary of present day El Sereno, the oldest community in Los Angeles. El Sereno is bordered on the north by South Pasadena and is Los Angeles? easternmost neighborhood.
Mrs. Jessie Yarnell Kimball, an avid buyer of Guy Rose?s paintings, purchased Sierra Vista Hill at Earl Stendahl?s Guy Rose Memorial Exhibition in 1926. Aside from being an admirer of Rose?s artwork, Jessie had a special interest in Sierra Vista Hill. Jesse Yarnell, her father and early newspaperman who established the Weekly Mirror, which took over the Los Angeles Times in 1881, lived atop a hill (now known as Rose Hill) in Sierra Vista. When Guy Rose painted Sierra Vista Hill, the area was undergoing real estate development, but hay and barley fields were still a part of the landscape. It is not known if the hill of haystacks in Rose?s painting was part of her family?s land holdings but there is no doubt Jessie Yarnell Kimball had a strong personal connection to the scene which she and her family intimately knew.

Sierra Vista Hill is recorded as No. 82 in the Memorial Catalogue. Stendahl wrote the following description for the painting:
?A hazy day broods over this typical glimpse of the Southern California
countryside. This is one of the works in which Guy Rose most clearly resembles Monet, for the founder of French Impressionism loved this mood of nature and he was partial to hay fields.''
No California landscape by Guy Rose makes a more direct, visual connection to Claude Monet and his famous haystack paintings than Sierra Vista Hill. When Rose saw this scene of haystacks plying the hill in Sierra Vista, very likely he could not help but think of his many years in France and then rendered a painting of it on the spot. The outcome is historical and exceptional. At first glance, one might think of it as a French scene, but we know it is not; it is local and ?made in California.? In execution, the painting is brilliantly Guy Rose in every way: composition, play of light, palette, and brushstroke.

With a stamp from the Guy Rose Sale verso ink signed by Ethel Rose and Earl Stendahl.

Visual: Craquelure throughout. Blacklight: A few very minor spots of touch-up throughout: a 1'' horizontal line and a spot in the lower right, a pea-sized spot and a few tiny dots in the upper right and a few tiny dots in the right center and one small spot in the lower center.