Charleston Loan Exhibition

26 George Romney (English, 1734–1802) Mary Rutledge Smith and son Edward London, England, 1786 Oil on canvas, 106 x 70 x 3¼ (framed) inches Historic Charleston Foundation, Charleston, SC, collection purchase with contributions from an anonymous southern foundation, 77.1.1 Conservation and transportation supported by Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Almeida and A. Calhoun Witham Jr. England’s most fashionable portrait painter, George Romney, completed this portrait of Mary Rutledge Smith (1747–1837) after fifteen sittings between January and May of 1786, at a cost of £104-18s-0d. The son of a cabinetmaker, Romney trained under Christopher Steele and his work illustrates the simple grandeur and heroic quality of neoclassical art. Smith, the wife of Colonel Roger Smith (1745–1805), is shown with their son Edward Nutt Smith (born 1785 in England), the twelfth of the couple’s thirteen children. The sumptuous dress and elegant but relaxed demeanor confirms the status of this Charleston wife and mother. Smith and child gaze earnestly from the canvas, exuding a confidence reserved for only the most distinguished of Romney’s sitters. This portrait was painted while Smith trav- elled abroad with her husband, living in England from 1785 until 1788. When the family returned to Charleston in 1788, they brought the painting with them, and it passed down through the female line of the Smith family. This portrait was exhibited throughout the nineteenth century in Charleston at the South Carolina Academy of Fine Arts and the Carolina Art Association. As a result, the painting was well known and much admired in the city. Because of financial difficulties, however, in 1888 family members sent the painting to London where it was sold the following year. For the next eighty- seven years it remained in the Swinton Collection at Masham, England. With the help of a preservation-minded patron, Historic Charleston Foundation purchased the portrait in 1976, and it returned to Charleston with much fanfare. BSC