Alice Ravenel Huger Smith

(1876-1958)

In a Low Country Forest 16 x 21 3/4 in. (40.6 x 55.3 cm.)

Footnotes

Provenance
William Mason Smith, Jr. (1910-1987), New York and Eleanor Mason (née Smith) Gaud (1909-1999), Bethesda, Maryland, nephew and niece of the artist respectively, by descent from the artist, 1958.
Olivia Mason "Holly" (née Smith) Leale (1944-2017), Auburn, Washington, daughter and niece of the above respectively, by descent from the above, 1999.
By descent from the above to the present owner, daughter of the above, 2017.

Exhibited
Greenville, South Carolina, Greenville County Museum of Art, Eight Southern Women: Blanche Lazzell, Josephine Marien Crawford, Nell Choate Jones, Clara Weaver Parrish, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Helen M. Turner, Mary Harvey Tannahill, Anne Goldthwaite, August 5-September 14, 1986, pp. 40, 56, illustrated, and elsewhere.

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith was a native of Charleston, South Carolina, born into a genteel Charleston family in 1876 when much of the South was experiencing harsh poverty and civil unrest during the era of Reconstruction. Smith would go on to become one of the leading figures of the Charleston Renaissance along with artists Elizabeth O'Neill Verner (1883-1979), Alfred Hutty (1877-1954), and Anna Heyward Taylor (1879-1956) and taught her generation of South Carolinian's to see the beauty in their landscape. The Charleston Renaissance was a period in the city's history lasting from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II in which the city experienced a burgeoning growth in the arts. Local artists, writers, architects, and historic preservationists came together to improve their city through the arts and preserve the historic buildings and objects that remained. Other artists of note that contributed to the Charleston Renaissance included Edwin Harleston (1882-1931), Anne Taylor Nash (1884-1968), and William Posey Silva (1859-1948), as well as visiting artists, such as Ellen Day Hale (1855-1940) and Childe Hassam (1859-1935). Unlike many of her fellow artists working during the Charleston Renaissance who portrayed urban scenes of everyday life in downtown Charleston, Smith preferred depicting the rural landscapes of the South Carolina Low Country and shedding light on vanishing ways of life in South Carolina.

In a Low Country Forrest is a captivating lyrical landscape that beautifully exhibits Smith's affinity for South Carolina's Low Country and demonstrates her mastered tonality and technique in transcribing all of it's lush seasonal manifestations. In the present work, Smith paints the tall grass, the moss on the trees, and the faint presence of human participants at center with vibrant shades of greens, yellows, and reds and applies each with a soft handling unique to her landscapes. Smith preferred the use of watercolor over oils for her landscapes, reasoning later in life that "Perhaps because although the latter [oils] is the easier medium I had the feeling even then that this country, in its soft haze and quiet distances, its usually gentle character and simple friendly intimacies was more easily depicted by the more transparent medium." (as quoted in Alice Smith, Reminiscences, unpublished manuscript at the South Carolina Historical Society). As evidenced in the present work, her acute understanding of watercolor's effects as a medium allowed her to capture the true atmosphere of the humid breeze that moves steadily through the thick brush of the Low Country's stretches of forest lands and rice planting sections. These qualities revered in Smith's best work are famously seen in her most celebrated series of twenty-nine watercolors that she executed to illustrate A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties (1936) by Herbert Ravenel Sass (1884-1958).

Near the end of her life, one of Smith's greatest contemporaries, Elizabeth O'Neill Verner remarked affectionately that "No one can ever again, after viewing Alice R. Huger Smith's pictures, see our Low Country without seeing her, for she has made it hers by her art. We who have been made aware of the subtle beauty of this land, by her portrayal of it, not only see the land but we see her...What she is painting is all that matters—how she will paint it is apparently no problem to her at all. And so, because she loves her Low Country, she has made it hers forever. She paints it all—the stark winter trees draped in ethereal moss, the curling ocean waves fringed with foam and the hovering gulls above—the field of winter broom grass and the gnarled and ancient cypress." (as quoted in Alice Ravenel Huger Smith of Charleston, South Carolina: An Appreciation On the Occasion of Her Eightieth Birthday from Her Friends, Charleston, South Carolina, 1956, p. 28) In a Low Country Forest is as much of a portrayal of Smith's identity as an artist and South Carolinian as it is a celebration of the beautiful environs of the South Carolina Low Country.