Leize Rose Stewart

American, 1887-1956

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A 1923 passport application for Leize Rose indicates that she was travelling to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, where she had lived from 1920 to 1922. With her husband, William Watts Rose, an employee of the War Department, she had traveled to England, France and Brazil throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Her permanent US address was in Washington, DC through at least 1926, and by 1930 she had relocated to New York. A passenger list for her return from England in that year lists her as single (evidently divorced; William Rose lived until 1950). In 1932 she married Duncan M. Stewart, though her name thereafter is given alternately as Leize Stewart, Leize Rose Stewart or Leize Rose. Initially a painter, she had a photo studio in 1933, though it isn't clear when she took up photography. Around that time she developed a process for photographically printing onto fabrics, which she patented in 1947, and which was adapted for producing camouflage for airplanes in World War II. Her company, Leize, Inc. was profiled in Life Magazine in 1948, in which a model wears a dinner dress decorated with her own portraits.