The elder sister of Herman, Bertha Suzanna (SUZE) Rosse (The Hague, 1 September 1884 – 17 April 1968) became a well-known Dutch painter.
After their marriage in London on 14 June 1913, they moved to Palo Alto, California, where Rosse was commissioned to design decorations for the Netherlands pavilion at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
In addition to teaching, he took private commissions for interiors, fabric designs and book illustrations, and created sets for the stage in conjunction with Ben Hecht, Kenneth Macgowan, the Goodman Theater, and Mary Garden's Chicago Grand Opera Company.
[11] In April 1919 his work was included in the highly popular Exhibition of American Stage Designs at the Bourgeois Galleries in New York City, along with contributions by Macgowan, the incomparable James Blanding Sloan, Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, Joseph Urban, and many others.
He created the sets for the Ziegfeld Follies (1922), Casanova and The Swan (1923), Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1926), The Great Magoo (1932), and Ulysses in Nighttown (1958); he authored and co-authored several publications and even designed a movie theatre where audiences could sit on either side of a gigantic screen.
The Theatre Arts Monthly, a magazine that frequently showcased Rosse's work, published an article on "Cinema Design" which highlighted with photographs his other films, including, The Murders of the Rue Morgue, East is West, Boudoir Diplomat, and Resurrection.
[14] Rosse worked in theatre in London and the Netherlands, taught as the Professor of Decorative Art at the Technische Hoogeschool in Delft, and designed Dutch pavilions at world's fairs in Brussels, Paris, and New York.