Charleston Loan Exhibition

54 Pierre Eugène Du Simitière (born Geneva, Switzerland, 1737–1784) Drayton Hall S.C. Charleston, SC, 1765 Watercolor and ink on paper, H. 8 ‹/* x W. 12½ inches Lent by the Lockard family Shedding fresh light on the original design and eighteenth-century appearance of Drayton Hall, North America’s earliest example of fully executed Anglo-Palladian architecture, is a newly discovered watercolor completed by the Swiss-born artist and naturalist Pierre Eugène Du Simitière (1736–1784). Painted during a visit to Charleston, in 1765, the work captured the Palladian five-part plan of Drayton Hall, complete with flanker buildings to the north and south and ornamental colonnade walls connecting the three buildings. Today, the colonnades no longer stand, perhaps due to the damages inflicted by Hessian soldiers who camped onsite during the American Revolution. The flanker buildings were destroyed by a major earthquake and a hurricane in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Another important feature documented in Du Simitière’s watercolor, but now missing, is the Doric entablature above the first floor of Drayton Hall’s double portico. The first of its kind in colonial America, Drayton Hall’s projecting and recessed portico has long been regarded as one of the building’s most Palladian details. Comparable entablatures can be found in eighteenth- century pattern books, such as James Gibbs’s Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture (1732) , but also the overall arrangement of Drayton Hall’s portico and entablature is similar to the garden front of Palladio’s own Villa Pisani (1552–1555). In Philadelphia, Pierre Eugène Du Simitière was active as a member and curator of the American Philosophical Society, and worked as the artist consultant for the committees that designed the Great Seal of the United States. His proposed design for the Great Seal, importantly, included the Eye of Providence as well as the United States motto E pluribus unum . CH