Madame Germaine Rouget Cheruy was a French costume designer, artist and intellectual who moved to the United States in 1924. She launched and taught art programs in private schools in Connecticut including the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. In 1939 she moved to Tucson, Arizona and in the early 1940s purchased a home with her husband Rene Cheury in the artist colony of old Fort Lowell. She lived happily with her husband in Arizona. She was recognized and best known for wash drawing, etching, woodblocks, painting, costume design, weaving, fiber arts and arts education.
In 1939 “carrying two suitcases” Cheruy arrived in Tucson, Arizona to spend the winter for her health. She rented a small house near Country Club and Speedway and described Tucson as a “wilderness” where “everybody was friendly, you never shut your door. In the good old time during the summer you would find two people on Congress Street. You could go to the movies for hours for 16 cents or the market with a dollar for the whole week’s shopping.” In 1941 she began teaching weekend and summer children art classes and sponsored an exhibit of her students work at the Tucson Center of Arts and Crafts. Rene joined Germaine permanently in 1945 and as the City of Tucson continued to grow they moved further out first to Bellevue Street and Alvernon Way to be near what they called the “greasewood and quail” and then seven miles from downtown to the “mesquite” of the established artist colony in the old Fort Lowell District. The American southwest desert city of Tucson provided Cheury with new areas of art to explore. She studied the style of painting found on old Mexican chests and spent hours researching at the Pioneer Historical Society. Her work and interest in historical themes permeated this period. In 1963 she said: “I was fascinated by the beginnings of Tucson.” Cheury’s well known work included a painted series of panels in a Mexican Style installed in the Old Adobe Patio in the Historic Landmark the Charles O. Brown House. In this work Cheury choose several prosaic historic scenes from Tucson past including the first ice cream in city, pie concession and two ladies trying to figure out whether coffee was meant to be fried. The Cheury’s were neighbors of painter and furniture maker Charles Bolsius. By the late 1950s at her home off Craycroft Road, Cheury she built a loom and practiced hand weaving and fiber arts. Germaine Rouget Cheury died in September 1980 in Tucson. Her work is included in the Graphic Arts Collection of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library.
