Rosa E. Neumann was the daughter of wealthy and locally influential railway engineer George Neumann (1817–1898), who in 1850 bought the Tracey Estate in Honiton, South Devon. Rosa Neumann's landscape paintings depict views around her Devon home and on Dartmoor, locations along the southern English and Welsh coasts, scenes in the Lake District, and views abroad in Switzerland and Italy. She was a prolific sketcher, her watercolours often small in size and serving to record an engagement with landscape in much the way photographs and postcards would do in decades to come.