Feature Articles

June Issue 1999

 

Gibbes Museum of Art Features In Pursuit of Refinement Exhibit

 

 

Splendours of fine and decorative art are being featured in the milestone exhibition In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740 -1860, at the Gibbes Museum of Art , Charleston, SC, through July 3, 1999. The exhibit will feature approximately 145 fine and decorative art objects associated with eighteenth-century and antebellum aristocratic life in Charleston. It examines the aesthetics, arts patronage and cultural history of the South Carolina Lowcountry, including the social, political and economic issues that encouraged close connections with Europe, particularly England, long after America's political independence.

Assembled from public and private collections around the world, In Pursuit of Refinement has brought together for the first time some of the best known and most representative paintings, furnishings, textiles and porcelain of Charleston's aristocratic class to be found in the United States and European collections. Featured are works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY; the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Art Museum of Nova Scotia, Canada; the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France; the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, England and more.

Nowhere in America was a European cultural orientation more evident than in eighteenth-century Charleston, where works from the European periods of John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, represented in this exhibition by Copley's portrait of Henry Laurens (1794-1792) and West's Thomas Middleton (1753 -1797), graced the drawing rooms of local dwellings. The works of Johann Zoffany, Allan Ramsay, and Sir Joshua Reynold were surrounded by exquisite settings that included made-to-order English furniture and English silver by Paul Stoor and fine French porcelain.

In 1773, Bostonian Josiah Quincy observed that Charleston, then the fourth largest urban center in British North America and the largest seaport in the South, "in grandeur, splendour of building, decorations, equipages, numbers, commerce, shipping and indeed in almost everything...far surpasses all I ever saw, or ever expected to see in America." Elite circles of Lowcountry planters and landowners became standard-bearers of cultural excellence and elegance through their patronage of the best artists and craftsmen working abroad. Examples of this in the exhibition include paintings by Thomas Gainsborough from the Tate Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; English candlesticks owned by Eliza Lucas Pinckney on loan from a private collection; and French porcelain made by the Comte dé Artois factory once owned by the Frost Family. The propensity to amass what was considered the finest in the arts and haute couture positioned Charleston as the cultural capital of America by the early nineteenth century.

The exhibit is presented with the cooperation of Historic Charleston Foundation with Carolina First as principal corporate sponsor.

For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or call the Museum at 843/722-2706.

 

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