The Charleston renaissance

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1998 by Martha R. Severens

These etchings of the old city constitute the tribute of a daughter who, whatever may be her imperfections, loves her reverently. If they shall in any way succeed in assisting the cause of those who have so valiantly fought to preserve her beauty, they will have fulfilled the most cherished hope of their creator.(7)

In addition to being an outspoken preservationist, Verner fought to retain the flower vendors, a local institution. These were black women who came to downtown Charleston from the outlying islands to sell their flowers and handmade sea-gross baskets. The city government regulated their activity, and at one point the mayor threatened to outlaw them. Verner took up their cause:

I wanted the flower women because I painted them and I needed them as models.... I pointed out [to the mayor] that Charleston had more free advertisement in nationally known magazines than any other city in the country and that in every picture a flower woman was strategically placed to give local color.(8)

The flower vendors appear regularly as shadowy figures in Verner's etchings, but they are the primary subjects of her pastels (see Pl. VI). She was one of the few artists of the Charleston renaissance to work in pastel, which she was inspired to do after seeing an exhibition of floral pastels by Laura Coombs Hills (1859-1952) in Boston. This may have persuaded her that pastels were more effective than etching for capturing the colorful nature of the flower women.

Anna Heyward Taylor, a native of South Carolina who moved to Charleston permanently in 1929, rendered the flower women in a woodblock print she entitled Gaden on He Head! (frontispiece and Pl. VIII), borrowing a phrase from Gullah, a melodious mixture of English and several African languages common in isolated areas along the Carolina coast. Her flower women stand in front of the Simmons-Edwards House, a Charleston landmark known for the carved pineapples - a symbol of hospitality - crowning its gateposts. Like Smith, she juxtaposed high-style architecture with street life.

While Smith, Verner, and Taylor chiefly celebrated the picturesqueness of Charleston, there are a handful of exceptions. In 1934, during the worst of the Great Depression, Verner depicted black laborers loitering in front of an unemployment office, but the most remarkable deviation is Taylor's Strike (PL. VII), a composite of two phases of cotton production. The background is dominated by the robes of the cotton gin, but in the foreground the workers are surrounded by spindles - a later stage of production. Moreover she has depicted the workers as black, whereas in the textile mills of the Carolinas the majority of workers were white. Black women were almost never hired? Taylor was the descendant of a wealthy cotton planting family from Columbia; her grandfather Benjamin Franklin Taylor had owned one of the largest cotton plantations in the state. Thus she may have been more than usually sensitive to the working conditions in the textile industry. Her watercolor caught the attention of a newspaper reporter, who described the scene in terms of a church revival meeting: