The Charleston renaissance – Charleston, South Carolina

Once called the “Queen of the South,” Charleston, South Carolina, languished during the last third of the nineteenth century, devastated by the Civil War and Reconstruction. The South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition of 1901-1902 was one of the attempts to redirect the city’s destiny by combining self-promotion and the beautification of Charleston. Although Chamber of Commerce publications celebrated population growth, modern conveniences, and good transportation by land and sea, the exposition did not entice new industry and ultimately ended in debt. Nevertheless, the city leaders learned one important lesson: Charleston’s greatest potential lay in attracting visitors by capitalizing on its climate, history, and architectural distinction. The mayor recognized one of the biggest hurdles when he said that “the first step in this direction is to sell Charleston to Charlestonians.”(1)

Artists and writers of the 1920s and 1930s contributed both consciously and unconsciously to this endeavor. They engendered pride among Charlestonians and disseminated images of the city to a broad national audience. As visitors came to Charleston and the surrounding Carolina low country, the foundation was laid for a cultural and physical renewal that created the tourist mecca that the city is today.

What is known as the Charleston renaissance, a period between about 1915 and 1940, was inspired by local artists and caused the citizens of Charleston to make use of their greatest assets – what a local newspaper called “beauty, tradition and romance” – to commemorate their past and chart their future.(2)

One of the leading artists in the movement was Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, a descendant of several distinguished families, who considered “poverty the inheritance of the land in which I dwelt.”(3) She was largely self-taught, having neither the money nor the inclination to go to art school. She learned from the prints of the Japanese ukiyo-e school, which she studied intensively, absorbing their formats, colors, and reverence for nature. In her woodblock print Mossy Tree (Pl. I) she applied the principles of the Japanese masters to her beloved low country, complete with hanging moss.

Alice Smith’s only real mentor was the tonalist painter Lowell Birge Harrison, who spent several winters in Charleston beginning in 1908. He and his wife stayed at the Villa Margherita, a stylish inn near the harbor that was also frequented by Eleanor Roosevelt and the writers Sinclair Lewis and Gertrude Stein. Harrison loved the moonlit views seen from the villa (see Pl. III), but there was no space for a studio. Smith came to the rescue with the offer of one of the old buildings behind her family’s house, and the two artists became friends. With Harrison’s encouragement Smith indulged her propensity for soft-edged atmospheric landscapes.

In 1917 Smith and her father, D. E. H. Smith (1846-1932), published The Dwelling Houses of Charleston, South Carolina, which was the seminal volume of the Charleston renaissance. Her evocative line drawings of houses and streetscapes and her father’s text instilled Charlestonians with pride in their architectural heritage. In 1931 a local newspaper alleged that

More than any other single factor [the book] has inspired and influenced the renaissance of the old houses that has taken place during the last ten years.(4)

Smith achieved recognition for her Japanesque woodblock prints and line drawings, but her true metier was watercolor. In The Rector’s Kitchen and View of St. Michael’s (Pl. IV)(5) she juxtaposed the high style of Charlestons landmark church with a vignette of a black figure emerging from an outbuilding. The church is delineated almost like an architectural rendering, while the outbuilding and figure are a brilliant display of local color.

Smith was not only a catalyst for architectural preservation, she was also the founding spirit of the Charleston Etchers’ Club in 1923. The club was inspired by similar associations around the country(6) and by four respected etchers who visited Charleston between 1910 and 1920: Ellen Day Hale (1855-1940), Gabrielle de Veaux Clements (18581948), Helen Hyde (1868-1919), and Bertha E. Jaques (1863-1941). These women provided technical support and made contacts on behalf of their Charleston counterparts.

The Charleston Etchers’ Club thrived during the 1920s, providing expertise, the use of a press owned by the club, and occasional exhibitions. Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Alfred Hutty, and several other members became proficient etchers and discovered that prints were an ideal medium to convey the charms of the city in book and periodical illustrations and as easily transported souvenirs.

Verner worked particularly hard, printing her own plates and selling prints. During the spring she opened her studio to tourists, put up visitors in her house, and served as a guide for museum groups. She made sure that shops and hotels carried postcard reproductions of her etchings, and she wrote and illustrated several books that both furthered her career and promoted Charleston as a destination for visitors. In her Prints and Impressions of Charleston, for which In the Shadow of St. Michael’s (Pl. V) was the frontispiece, she wrote:

These etchings of the old city constitute the tribute of a daughter who, whatever may be her imperfections, loves her reverently. If they shall in any way succeed in assisting the cause of those who have so valiantly fought to preserve her beauty, they will have fulfilled the most cherished hope of their creator.(7)

In addition to being an outspoken preservationist, Verner fought to retain the flower vendors, a local institution. These were black women who came to downtown Charleston from the outlying islands to sell their flowers and handmade sea-gross baskets. The city government regulated their activity, and at one point the mayor threatened to outlaw them. Verner took up their cause:

I wanted the flower women because I painted them and I needed them as models…. I pointed out [to the mayor] that Charleston had more free advertisement in nationally known magazines than any other city in the country and that in every picture a flower woman was strategically placed to give local color.(8)

The flower vendors appear regularly as shadowy figures in Verner’s etchings, but they are the primary subjects of her pastels (see Pl. VI). She was one of the few artists of the Charleston renaissance to work in pastel, which she was inspired to do after seeing an exhibition of floral pastels by Laura Coombs Hills (1859-1952) in Boston. This may have persuaded her that pastels were more effective than etching for capturing the colorful nature of the flower women.

Anna Heyward Taylor, a native of South Carolina who moved to Charleston permanently in 1929, rendered the flower women in a woodblock print she entitled Gaden on He Head! (frontispiece and Pl. VIII), borrowing a phrase from Gullah, a melodious mixture of English and several African languages common in isolated areas along the Carolina coast. Her flower women stand in front of the Simmons-Edwards House, a Charleston landmark known for the carved pineapples – a symbol of hospitality – crowning its gateposts. Like Smith, she juxtaposed high-style architecture with street life.

While Smith, Verner, and Taylor chiefly celebrated the picturesqueness of Charleston, there are a handful of exceptions. In 1934, during the worst of the Great Depression, Verner depicted black laborers loitering in front of an unemployment office, but the most remarkable deviation is Taylor’s Strike (PL. VII), a composite of two phases of cotton production. The background is dominated by the robes of the cotton gin, but in the foreground the workers are surrounded by spindles – a later stage of production. Moreover she has depicted the workers as black, whereas in the textile mills of the Carolinas the majority of workers were white. Black women were almost never hired? Taylor was the descendant of a wealthy cotton planting family from Columbia; her grandfather Benjamin Franklin Taylor had owned one of the largest cotton plantations in the state. Thus she may have been more than usually sensitive to the working conditions in the textile industry. Her watercolor caught the attention of a newspaper reporter, who described the scene in terms of a church revival meeting:

The Negroes have protested against a new policy of the owners and have worked themselves up into a frenzy of excitement. The workers are joining in a semi-savage dance, throwing their arms into the air and shouting. The picture vibrates with color and action.(10)

Alfred Hutty was the fourth leading figure in the Charleston renaissance, although he was not a full-time resident. He worked for Tiffany Studios and lived in Woodstock, New York, happening on Charleston while looking for a place to spend the winter. On arrival he wired his wife: “Come quickly, have found heaven.”(11) For the next five years, from 1920 to 1924, Hutty directed the school of the Carolina Art Association at the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston. He was one of the founding members of the Charleston Etchers Club, electing to work primarily in drypoint, but also producing ambitious paintings from time to time.

Unlike his female counterparts, Hutty saw things literally, He was inclined toward stucco surfaces in disrepair and stooped figures relaxing in doorways. One of his most picturesque works is Cabbage Row (Pl. IX), a drypoint depicting the tenement immortalized by DuBose Heyward (1885-1940) in his novel Porgy. Heyward changed the name of the building and situated it on the waterfront He wrote:

Catfish Row, in which Porgy lived, was not a row at all, but a great brick structure that lifted its three stories about the sides of an ancient court…. The south wall, which was always in shadow, was lichened from pavement to rotting gutter; and opposite, the northern face, unbroken except by the rows of small-paned windows, showed every color through its flaking stucco.(12)

More than most artists, Hutty successfully evoked Heyward’s Charleston, which the novelist called “an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed.”(13) The affinity between Hutty and Heyward was noted as early as 1929 by Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), the founder of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., when he wrote: “Hutty captures the essence of Charleston…. He salvages what he can of the picturesque antiquity which is passing away.”(14)

Etching ideally suited both Verner and Hutty in their representations of Charleston. Verner’s lines are for the most part straight and parallel, except when she rendered trees. She was disposed to venerate the city’s architecture and she inevitably spruced up its monuments in her pictures. Hutty, on the other hand, combined etching and drypoint, resulting in broader tonal effects and more animated lines.(15)

Artists attracted to Charleston by the work of its native artists sometimes made brief visits and sometimes returned often. Only Hutty became a regular seasonal resident, from 1920 until his death in 1956. A painter before he was a printmaker, Hutty turned to offs to render the local plantations and gardens. His impressionist display of color was in keeping with his subject (see Pl. XI). In broadly applied vertical strokes he captured the dangling Spanish moss and the shimmering reflections of flowers and trees. In contrast to his picturesque urban views and virtual caricatures of blacks, Hutty’s off paintings are idyllic evocations of a tranquil landscape.

Hutty was not alone in his response to the splendor of the Ashley River plantations. William P. Silva, a regular visitor to Charleston, also painted local gardens using many of the same devices. Yet Silva differed from Hutty in two respects: he was a native southerner, born in Savannah, and he had studied in Paris, where he had encountered the work of the impressionists. Many of his paintings are reminiscent of Claude Monet’s water lily series, with their hazy edges and almost palpable atmosphere. However, unlike Monet, Silva often titled his canvases poetically, without reference to specific locations (see Pl. X).

Lilla Cabot Perry was a neighbor and protegee of Monet’s at Giverny and came to Charleston to recuperate from a nearly fatal bout of diphtheria. Paintings such as the one in Plate XIII reveal how live oaks were central to her appreciation of the countryside, just as poplars had been in France. Like Birge Harrison, who complained to Alice Smith about the difficulty of rendering Spanish moss, Perry appears to have found this southern oddity a challenge.

Many artists appear to have come to Charleston to escape the long northern winters. Frederick Childe Hassam, visiting in the spring of 1925, made drawings of the city’s colonial churches and verdant streets. These he translated into etchings that are graphic interpretations of his impressionistic paintings (see Pl.II). However, they are less literal than those by artists such as Verner and Smith, for Hassam etched the plate directly from his drawing. As a result, the print shows the drawing in reverse.

Edward Hopper and his wife Josephine Nivison Hopper (1883-1968), also a painter, spent about three weeks in Charleston in April 1929. During this stay Hopper produced eleven watercolors, mostly outdoor scenes of sunstruck houses and rural cabins. One – a view of the cannon overlooking Charleston harbor – reflects Hoppers interest in the Civil War.(16) The watercolor shown in Plate XVI is Hoppers only painting of a church interior.(17) The composition is dominated by the curiously draped font – a form comparable to the lonely figures that populate Hopper’s other paintings.

Prentiss Taylor, a Washington, D.C., printmaker, visited Charleston at the prompting of the poet Josephine Pinckney (1895-1957). He spent four months in Charleston in 1933, recording his impressions in sketchbooks. Reflecting his keen observation and sense of humor is a sketch of three run-down buildings inscribed: “It was here that a shop – it was the middle one – had a sign ‘meals at all hours.’ Underneath was a framed picture of the ‘Last Supper.’”(18)

Under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project (established by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933), Taylor made a series of lithographs from his drawings. In Horlbeck Alley (Pl. XII) he conveyed the deteriorated condition of the buildings and the street life of the residents in a manner very reminiscent of Heyward’s Porgy. Lithography was a medium often associated with journalism and political satire, and it experienced a revival during the Depression in keeping with the populist spirit of the time.

Palmer Schoppe (b. 1912) traveled to Charleston more on a whim, perhaps inspired by the southern rambles of Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), his teacher at the Art Students League in New York City. His lithographs of blacks working the fields are a synthesis of his subject matter and Bentons energized figurative style.

Like Schoppe, Henry Botkin portrayed low-country blacks in a manner no Charleston artist would have attempted. Botkin stayed with his cousin George Gershwin (1898-1937) at DuBose Heywards beach house on Folly Island while Gershwin completed the score for the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Botkin was Gershwin’s painting teacher and also formed the composers art collection. Botkin’s own paintings correspond in subject and style to Gershwin’s music. One reviewer remarked of the two cousins:

They talked art together and spent years of their lives together…. In Botkin’s painting, brilliant in colorful harmonic dissonances, there is the same bright gaiety and tempered pathos of the blues, the same light design, and one might say the same “modernity” which pervades apiece by Gershwin.(19)

While in the low country Botkin painted a series of small, earth-toned canvases that depict blacks. In one a group is gesturing while singing spirituals – a scene that recalls Gershwin’s opera. In Porgy (Pl. XIV) Botkin attempted a visual rendition of the operas protagonist. Oddly enough, although Porgy is so intimately associated with the plight of blacks in Charleston, there are very few visual representations of him.

Exhibitions of Botkin’s southern paintings received mixed reviews. One critic called him an American Gauguin and described his paintings of Folly Beach as “the closest thing to Tahiti this side of the Pacific,” while another castigated him for ignoring the real plight of Southern blacks.(20)

George Biddle came to Folly Beach in May and June 1930. Like Botkin he was a well-educated and well-traveled artist. During his stay he made ink sketches with delicate watercolor washes that he later developed into oil paintings and lithographs. Almost all his work is figurative, and white and black people are caricatured equally. Biddle’s painting style was eclectic, characterized by shimmering colors and figures with energetic, rhythmic outlines (see Pl. XV).

Blacks were essential in any artist’s treatment of the low country. Most visiting artists during the Charleston renaissance came from cities in the North, and in their pictures they were inclined to exaggerate the African characteristics of their subjects. Charleston artists, by contrast, tended to perpetuate paternalistic attitudes, portraying blacks as romanticized figures sitting on doorsteps, working in the fields, or selling flowers.

With the advent of World War II, the Charleston Navy Yard contributed significantly to the economy, and the population of the city soared. Many of the artists of the Charleston renaissance lived into the 1950s to witness the gradual revival of tourism. About this time Alice Smith started her autobiography with the following:

I live in a town which being old is becoming new…a town where the new is welcomed and the old is still loved.(21)

A traveling exhibition entitled The Charleston Renaissance opens at the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, on December 2 and remains on view until March 7, 1999. It will be seen at the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina, from April 3 to June 3, 1999; at the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia, from September 9 to November 7, 1999; and at the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, from November 23, 1999, to January 30, 2000. The exhibition, sponsored by Carolina First Bank, is accompanied by a book of the same title as the exhibition (available from Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc. by telephoning 864-583-9847).