Artists
Research Sold Works

Home      About      Events      Links      Contact

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith
Born in 1876 in Charleston, South Carolina to very prominent families on both her father & mother’s sides, Alice Smith became one of the leading figures in the Charleston Renaissance. Primarily self taught, she began her formal art training at the Carolina Art Association. She soon became friends with Lovell Birge Harrison, a Woodstock painter who was vacationing in Charleston. Harrison was a major influence in Alice Smith’s career but she was also impressed by Japanese woodblock prints. The aqueous nature of the watercolors which she would soon master, was perfectly suited for her tendency to absorb nature and paint from memory. The herons, egrets, moss laden trees, abandoned rice fields, and moonlit marshes of the Carolina lowcountry became her muse. Alice Smith, much like Alexander Drysdale in Louisiana and Will Henry Stevens and Elliott Daingerfield in North Carolina, chose to paint the South in an idealized, romanticized, and positive way. Alice Smith died in 1958.