Lot 391: ALICE RAVENEL HUGER SMITH THE PLANTATION SETTLEMENT

Framed limited edition color lithograph by Charleston, South Carolina artist Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876-1958) who was a native and lifelong resident of that city. The print is titled Sunday Morning at The Great House and is #366 of a limited edition of 984, Published by the Lakeside Press Chicago c. 1972 . The original watercolor work was done in the 1930s and was from her series, “A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties.” Professionally framed and double matted. In frame measures 30.75x26.25. Weight is 9 pds 4 oz. 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

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