Alice Alice Ravenel Huger Smith

Over 50 famous watercolors are superbly reproduced in color. The text explores Smith's prominent role in Charleston and its history.

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876-1958), a leader of the Charleston Renaissance, immortalized the beauty and history of the Carolina Lowcountry and helped propel the region into an important destination for cultural tourism. A lifelong Charleston resident, she helped spark the city's historic preservation movement, depicted the waning days of rice planting, and captured the mystical spirit of the Lowcountry in luminous watercolors. This beautifully-illustrated volume is a personal account of the artist's life and work that draws on unpublished papers, letters, and interviews. It includes over 200 paintings, prints, sketches, and photographs, many shared for the first time. The most comprehensive book ever made of Alice's work, it is both an important contribution to Southern art scholarship and a gorgeous addition to the bookshelves of art lovers.Published by Evening Post Books in collaboration with the Middleton Place Foundation.

A Woman Rice Planter offers insights into a broad spectrum of Southern life after the Civil War. As an account of a woman's struggle for survival and dignity in a distinctly male-dominated society, it contributes significantly to women's history. It presents a rich portrait of a distinctive place—the South Carolina Low Country—in a troubled and generally undocumented time, a portrait made all the more vivid by the fine pen-and-ink sketches of Charleston artist Alice R. Huger Smith. Elizabeth Alston Pringle was the daughter of Robert Francis Withers Allston, a state legislator and governor, who was at one time owner of seven plantations but bankrupt at the time of his death. Left to struggle for income to regain the property and position the family held prior to the war, Pringle turned to writing and eventually published a column on Southern culture in the New York Sun under the pseudeonym Patience Pennington. In 1913 she collected and reshaped these newspaper columns and compiled them into one volume, A Woman Rice Planter, a best-selling book that reduced her financial worries. Her descriptions of the vagaries of rice planting, of her relationships with former slaves and the first generation of free-born African Americans, and of her life in the early Reconstruciton period are important to our understanding of the prevailing attitudes and persistence of the Old South in the New. The volume was illustrated by Alice R. Huger Smith (1876–1958), an American painter and printmaker. This edition features an introduction by Charles Joyner (1935–2016), distinguished professor emeritus of southern history and culture at Coastal Carolina University and author of several books, including Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community.

The catalog for "Through the pines, the poetic vision of Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, an exhibition of 12 watercolors and 3 woodblock prints," on view at Carolina Galleries, 188 King Street, Charleston, South Carolina, during the autumn of 2002. This publication "visually documents two significant, private, lowcountry collections, " that of Anne (Mrs. William P.) Montague and the McInvaill family, particularly Henry McInvaill.--p. [1].

Through eighty-nine color plates and six thematic essays, this collection examines depictions of plantations, plantation views, and related slave imagery in the context of the history of landscape painting in America, while addressing the impact of these images on US race relations.

"The Charleston Renaissance chronicles a dynamic period of Southern history, detailing the artistic legacy of native and national artists whose collective image-making led to Charleston's transformation from a faded Southern capital to a premier tourist destination. Martha Severens, as art historian, curator, and former Charleston resident, introduces readers to the city's traditions and lore, and delineates their impact on the art of the day. Through her examination of the major local figures of the period - Alfred Hurry, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, and Verner - as well as the impressive list of visiting artists - including Birge Harrison, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Lilla Cabot Perry, and many more - Severens expands upon the existing scholarship, adding new depth and dimension to both the period and the place. Ultimately, by connecting the artistic advances in Charleston to the greater American art scene, Severens brings clarity to the "ancient, beautiful" city's vital role in Southern art and American regionalism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved