AFA Autumn 2018

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 101 Along a fifteen-mile stretch of the Ashley River running northwest of Charleston lies a string of antebellum rice plantations, including Drayton Hall, Middleton Place, Runnymede, and Magnolia Gardens, that consistently attracted both resident and visiting plein air painters. The natural beauty of the river, its lagoons, ancient live oaks, and brilliant azalea gardens repeatedly drew William P. Silva, a native of nearby Savannah, Georgia. Silva successfully operated a family business before completely dedicating himself to painting at the age of forty-eight. He studied French Impressionism firsthand in Paris, exhibited there, and, although he settled permanently in the Carmel, California, art colony in 1913, he was active throughout his career in the Southern States Art League and often returned to paint in the picturesque coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. Reminiscent of Monet’s famed studies of haystacks and cathedral facades, Silva’s The Sun Dispels the Morning Fog was one of a series of Lowcountry plantation paintings that explored in endless variations the atmospheric effects of heat and humidity on color and form. A native midwesterner, Wilson Irvine, visited Charleston around 1930. In the course of his accomplished career, Irvine had traveled extensively in Europe and America, eventually settling in Connecticut, where he was a mainstay of the Old Lyme community of Impressionist painters. By the time he visited Charleston, Irvine had developed an unusual technique that mimicked the effects of light refracted through a prism. He applied this method to Charleston street subjects found in the historic district as well as to Lowcountry genre scenes he observed at the Cheeha-Combahee Plantation, a parcel of ten thousand acres that was assembled and purchased in 1929 by industrialist Frederic B. Pratt, president of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. William P. Silva (1859–1948), Sunrise Through the Fog, Runnymede, 1931. Oil on canvas, 41 x 50½ inches. Wilson Irvine (1869–1936), Elliott Street, Charleston, ca. 1932. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches. Drawn from the permanent collection of the Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina, Impressionism and the South, on view through September 16, 2018, highlights fifteen examples by American artists with Southern connections. For more information, call 864.271.7570, or visit www.gcma.org. This article was compiled by Paula Angermeier, Greenville County Museum of Art’s head of communications.