Lot 371: 2 ALICE RAVENEL HUGER SMITH PRINTS

Two Framed color prints by Charleston, South Carolina artist Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876-1958) who was a native and lifelong resident of that city. Professionally framed and double matted. In frame each measures 28 1/2x22 1/2"x2". Weight combined is 17 pds. PROVENANCE: A Charleston SC Private Estate. Born in 1876 to a distinguished family, her paternal grandmother (who raised her; Smith’s mother died when she was 12), Eliza Carolina Middleton Huger, was the granddaughter of Arthur Middleton, signer of the Declaration of Independence and patriarch of Middleton Place plantation, and her father’s father was a descendent of Bishop Robert Smith, the first post-Revolution Bishop of South Carolina, she grew up amidst the waning shadow of her family’s former wealth, in a city as poor as it was proud. “Poverty was the inheritance of the land in which I dwelt,” she wrote in her “Reminiscences,” memoir-like recollections about her childhood and family life that Smith began penning at age 74 (she died in 1958 at age 81). Along with her friends Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, Alfred Hutty, and Anna Heyward Taylor, Smith was at the center of Charleston's artistic reawakening during the early twentieth century. She was an active contributor to the city’s cultural development and a founding member of the Charleston Etcher’s Club and the Southern States Art League. She was also involved in the Historic Charleston Foundation, Carolina Art Association, and Music and Poetry Society

good, nicks to frame