Alice Ravenel Huger Smith

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (July 14, 1876 – February 3, 1958) was an American painter and printmaker. She was one of the leading figures in the so-called Charleston Renaissance, along taking into consideration Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, Alfred Hutty, and Anna Heyward Taylor.

Smith was a indigenous of Charleston, South Carolina, and had been born into one of the most prominent families of the city. Her parents were Caroline (Ravenel) Smith and Daniel Elliott Smith. Through her great-great-grandfather Daniel Ravenel (1762-1807), she was a vague cousin of the writers Harriott Horry Ravenel, Beatrice Ravenel, and Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel.

Smith expected some basic training, early in her career, at the Carolina Art Association, but otherwise remained largely self-taught throughout her life. She traveled rarely, only traveling subsequent to to Canada, and hated change; she disliked the automobile intensely, and preferred to walk.

Smith began her career as a portraitist, copying out of date family images and painting links and relations; during this grow old she afterward painted fans and dance cards. In 1910 she began experimenting later woodblock printing and etching, seeing limited execution in the latter field but much in the former due to her wisdom of color; even suitably she would tutor etching during the 1920s, with Elizabeth O'Neill Verner becoming a notable pupil.

After experimenting behind oil paints and printmaking, Smith eventually settled upon watercolor as her preferred medium, in which she would play-act for the get out of of her life. Smith was after that deeply lively in Charleston's artistic community; a founding advocate of the Charleston Etcher's Club and the Southern States Art League, she was also effective in the Historic Charleston Foundation, Carolina Art Association, and the Music and Poetry Society.

Smith's action was involve by ukiyo-e and supplementary Japanese styles, which she would have known from prints in the collection of her cousin, Harvard professor Motte Alston Read; this aesthetic was reinforced by a breath of lively air to the art of Helen Hyde, with whose exploit Smith became acquainted behind Hyde visited Charleston. Another visitor who made an impact on her artistic expand was Birge Harrison, whom she came to know gone he spent an lengthy period of become old in the city in 1908.

Unlike many of her fellow South Carolina artists, Smith preferred the rural landscape of the Carolina Lowcountry to urban scenes of Charleston considering searching for subjects. She was also keen in recording vanishing ways of life; her best-known put on an act is the series of twenty-nine watercolors she painted to illustrate A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties by Herbert Sass. Many of her become old watercolors depict scenes from rural salt marshes. Early in her career she also illustrated a volume by her father, D. E. H. Smith, a historian; titled The Dwelling Houses of Charleston, it was published in 1917 and sparked the historical preservation pastime in the city. She illustrated substitute of her father's books as well, and contributed illustrations to several other volumes roughly South Carolina throughout her career.

Smith exhibited widely throughout her career, both in South Carolina and elsewhere in the United States. Some of her work, including the Sass watercolors, is owned by the Carolina Art Association and may be seen at the Gibbes Museum of Art, which conserved the pieces with the counsel of the Harvard University Art Museums. Several of her watercolors are held by the Johnson Collection of Southern Art. A increase of pastels depicting the interior of the Joseph Manigault House is owned by the Charleston Museum.

Other museums in the same way as her put-on include the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Two Red Roses Foundation, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the M. H. de Young Museum. One of her watercolors appeared on Antiques Roadshow in 2013, where it was appraised at $85,000.

Smith's papers are held by the South Carolina Historical Society.

Smith is buried at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston.=