ALICE RAVENEL HUGER SMITH AT THE GIBBS MUSEUM IN CHARLESTON SC

Recently, in Charleston SC, I discovered the watercolor artist Alice Ravenel Huger Smith.  The watercolors are politically suspect as they are seen from the point of view of a women in a privileged position in the south during the harsh time of Jim Crow law. Adam Parker writes in the Post and Courier: 

"She made these plantation paintings during the height of Jim Crow, when black people in Charleston and throughout the country were subjected to humiliating discrimination and life-threatening abuse.

She knew of this, of course. She lived downtown, a single woman surviving on the income generated from the sale of her art. Not far away from her was intense poverty. This was the period of “Porgy and Bess,” of street calls and street fights, of hunger and vocal prayer."

Nevertheless, a lot of the work transcended the politics of the time, particularly the landscape, which is what I'm going to focus on.  Below is a blurb from the museum  and some photos I took while there. Please excuse the reflections on the glass. I would suggest your click on the Adam Parker article for more information.

The Rice Plantation Series

Watercolors by Alice Ravenel Huger Smith

GALLERY G

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876–1958) was a leading artist of the cultural and economic renaissance that occurred in Charleston between the two world wars. Smith disseminated the history and mythology of her beloved lowcountry to a national audience through her evocative images, numerous writings, and civic activities. Produced in mid-career, A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties was the most ambitious of her publications. The series of watercolors and the accompanying text, which includes an essay on rice cultivation by historian Herbert Ravenel Sass and the boyhood memoirs of her father Daniel Elliott Huger Smith, are meant to preserve a "first-hand knowledge" of life on a rice plantation in the 1850s. Through a series of skillful and compelling watercolors, Smith offers a romantic vision of plantation life from a planter's perspective.

Read about the conservation efforts taken by the Gibbes Museum to preserve this collection of watercolors.