Lot 393: ALICE RAVENEL HUGER SMITH HARVEST LITHO

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith "Ready for the Harvest" Lithograph from the series A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties. Signed in the plate. Measures in frame 29 1/4"x25"x1 1/4". Weight 9 pds. PROVENANCE: A Private Charleston SC 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.

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