Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1994 by Martha R. Severens

In 1985, after nearly a dozen years of mounting exhibitions of contemporary art, the Greenville County Museum of Art began to form a chronologically comprehensive collection of art related to the South. Since then this objective has been largely accomplished, and next year a catalogue of more than 140 works will be published.

A substantial number of works of art have been purchased with the gift of two million dollars by the Arthur and Holly Magill Foundation. Equally significant has been the groundswell of support by the community, which has made possible the acquisition of some of the most valuable canvases in the collection (see Pls. IV, VIII). An annual antiques show that relies on the participation of many local businesses and individuals and the efforts of hard-working volunteers has raised additional money for the museum's acquisition fund.

The great majority of the artists represented in the southern collection are native to the region, while others came to the South as itinerants, tourists, retirees, and teachers. Georgia O'Keeffe, for example, taught women at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina--an experience that was clearly a turning point for her, since she felt so isolated there that she was driven to devote herself to her art. As she wrote in 1916 to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, "Hibernating in South Carolina is an experience I would not advise anyone to miss--The place is of so little consequence--except for the outdoors--that one has a chance to give one's mind, time, and attention to anything one wishes."(1) In South Carolina, O'Keeffe produced evocatively abstract compositions (see Pl. XII) that won her immediate praise and helped to captivate Stieglitz, to some extent bringing the two together.

Because the museum's collection has only recently been formed it includes many works by women artists and African-Americans. Taking advantage of recent scholarship that has shed new light on the role of women artists, the museum acquired the pastel portrait by Henrietta Johnston shown in Plate VII. Among art historians in Ireland, where she spent a period of time, she is known as Henrietta Dering, as she signed several pastels about 1704. Only recently has her maiden name, de Beaulieu, come to light, confirming the suspicion of ANTIQUES'S first editor, Homer Eaton Keyes, that she was of Huguenot descent.(2) In America she has consistently been referred to as Henrietta Johnston, the wife of Gideon Johnston (d. 1716), the rector of Saint Philip's Church in Charleston, South Carolina. His correspondence documents the fact that his wife painted portraits to supplement the family's income, making her the first professional woman artist in America.(3)

The colonial taste for the latest English fashions is found in the work of Jeremiah Theus, a Charleston portraitist with a modest background as a sign painter (see Pl. V). Theus appropriated poses and costumes from English mezzotints for his portraits, making his sitters appear to be on a par with English gentry. When rendering faces, however, Theus had a knack for unflinching realism.

One of the most outstanding works in the collection is Benjamin Hawkins and the Creek Indians of about 1805 (Pl. VI). Instead of portraying military heroism, this history painting examines Thomas Jefferson's attempts to educate native Americans. Benjamin Hawkins (1754-1816), appointed an Indian agent by George Washington, shared Jefferson's beliefs and even established his own model farm along the Flint River in Georgia. In the painting Hawkins instructs members of the Creek tribe in the use of the plow. The landscape behind him and the abundant harvest in the foreground are a tribute to his success as a teacher of husbandry and farming. The painting predates incidents leading to the War of 1812 that made Jefferson's policies regarding the Indians unpopular. The painter (or perhaps painters) of the canvas is unknown, but he may have taken inspiration from engravings of such well-known works as Penn's Treaty with the Indians, painted between 1771 and 1772 by Benjamin West.(4)

In many respects the collection is interesting because the museum felt no obligation to acquire only typical examples of southern painting. The painting by Thomas Sully shown in Plate III, for instance, depicts a subject from Greek mythology and was once in the artist's own collection, indicating his own tastes and interests. It is one of five copies Sully made of a version of Ganymede once attributed to the seventeenth-century Italian master Guido Reni, which was given to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1812 by Joseph Allen Smith of South Carolina. Sully's selection of Reni is telling, for of all the Italian baroque painters, Reni was known for graceful, languid figures of the kind typically found in Sully's portraits.

Old master paintings were also significant to Washington Allston, who spent almost fifteen years studying them in Europe. He specialized in grandly conceived narrative paintings based on religious or literary themes. Allston's romantic sensibilities are reflected in his passion for the work of Michelangelo, Salvator Rosa, and Rembrandt. In Isaac of York (Pl. X), for example, he relied on Rembrandt, although not on a specific painting. Like the Dutch painter, Allston was intrigued by the appearance of Polish Jews, whom he encountered in London. Reminiscent of Rembrandt's high priests, Allston's Isaac projects an otherworldly gaze that radiates spirituality. This is one of four paintings of Polish Jews by Allston; all are related to figures in the background of his unfinished masterpiece, Belshazzar's Feast, painted between 1817 and 1843.(5)