 The Art in America art critic Lawrence Campbell wrote of his work in 1990, "Herman Rose, who is, in my opinion, the greatest living painter of landscape and still life in the U.S., has never for a moment abandoned the practice of painting from direct observation....Yet when Rose looks at anything, he seems able to participate with his entire being in the scene 'out there,' seeing beyond the relationships of space, distance and comparative size, or even of reflected light.