Roses appear in many of Dalí's works; in the Thirties he made several paintings of women whose heads were formed by roses. Dalí uses the rose as a female sexual symbol. The Invisible Man (1929—32) includes two partially naked women with huge roses appearing where their wombs should be. In 1930, Dalí used this image again but in a more definitive way, depicting a nude woman with bleeding roses coming from her womb. To Dalí then, the rose represented menstruation and the internal reproductive organs of women.
The Rose shares a similar structure with the Portrait of Gala with the Rhinocerotic Symptoms (1954). Both paintings have the familiar intensely blue sky as a backdrop to a dominating central image that hovers over a Spanish landscape. The paintings also share the same vivid red color of the rose, which contrasts so effectively with the blue sky; in Portrait of Gala with the Rhinocerotic Symptoms, the red is used for the border beneath her head. In The Rose, there is a tiny drop of water on one of the petals of the flower, as realistic as a photograph. Dalí often used this effect of trompe l'oeil to highlight a small detail of a painting.