Charles Fraser

Charles Fraser (August 20, 1782-October 5, 1860) was an American-born painter of Scottish descent who depicted people and places associated with his native Charleston, South Carolina.

History

Fraser began his art practice as a prolific amateur, producing miniature portraits of friends and family, as well as carefully rendered watercolor depictions of buildings and scenery in and around Charleston. Until the age of 36, he vacillated between art and the legal career he had embarked on in 1798, studying law in the office of John Julius Pringle, Attorney General of South Carolina. Fraser continued to practice law until 1817 when he finally committed himself to a professional artistic career. Fraser had formed his landscape style in the mid-1790s under the tutelage of the view painter and engraver Thomas Coram, who reportedly set him to copy European prints and the illustrations in British travel guidebooks. Fraser, like Coram, was highly influenced by the the picturesque aesthetic conventions popularized by the British writer William Gilpin, and he became one of the first artists to adapt picturesque models to the distinctive architecture and landscape of the American South. A sketchbook begun in 1796 and completed in 1806 contains both Fraser’s copies of European prints as well as his original depictions of local scenes with which he had a personal connection, such as Pringle’s new plantation house on the Ashley River [Fig. __] and Brabant, the country “seat” of Fraser’s former schoolmaster, Rev. Robert Smith [Fig. __]. The sketchbook also contains precisely delineated portraits of the country seats established by Fraser’s siblings, including those near Goosecreek on land that had originally formed part of the family plantation, Wigton (named for their ancestral home in Scotland) [Fig. __]. Although these house portraits were clearly influenced by the European prints Fraser collected — which included representations of stately English manor houses as well as engravings after the atmospheric landscapes of the seventeenth-century painters Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine — Fraser’s depictions of Charleston plantations are also highly specific in their representation of local terrain, botanical specimens, and architectural details.< ref> Severens, 78, 84-85. </ref>

In 1806 Fraser ventured further afield, making the first of several trips up the eastern seaboard, traveling as far north as Boston. Painterly descriptions of landscape scenery recur in his letters home. Of northern Connecticut, he observed, “The scenery around there is very wild and Picturesque — hills of immense height — broken rocks, etc. make it one of the most striking scenes I ever beheld.” In 1816 Fraser sold “twenty very beautiful drawings of scenes, in different parts of the United States” to ‘’The Analectic Magazine’’, which published eight engravings after his sketches from 1816 and 1818. After embarking on his professional artistic career in 1817, Fraser had initially focused on portraiture, producing an estimated 400 portraits of Charlestonians in meticulously rendered miniatures. During the 1830s his patrons’ dwindling interest in painted portraits, the emergence of an American landscape tradition, and his own deteriorating eyesight caused Fraser to shift his attention back to landscapes. Along with watercolor, he also began working in oils, depicting actual locations in the northeast as well as imagined European scenes, and copies after engravings. In addition to Gilpin, Fraser was influenced by the landscapes of the seventeenth-century painters from whom Gilpin's theories derived, chiefly Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa. Fraser collected prints after their paintings and published a poetic tribute "Salvator Rosa" in The Charleston Book, a miscellany published in 1845 that also included Fraser's essay on the history of gardening.

In the Charleston of his day, Fraser was as well known for his orations, literary pursuits, cultural authority and civic engagement as he was for his art, and, towards the end of his life, was lauded as the city’s most beloved artist. In February 1857, a group of Charleston gentlemen assembled a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work staged as The Fraser Gallery. While the first section of the display featured Fraser’s miniatures, the second offered “landscapes and other pieces.” Contemporary reports recall the artist’s turns about the South Carolina Society Hall, where, “leaning on the arm of a young companion, or old friend … [he] walked around the gallery, calling up reminiscences of his artist life, criticising his own pictures, and as they loomed up through the long area, pausing with a dreamy wonder, as if he were in some enchanted vision.”

In 1853, at the age of 71, Fraser presented his recollections of Charleston in a lecture delivered to the Conversation Club, subsequently published in the Charleston Courier and then revised and expanded as Reminiscences of Charleston (1854). Fraser traced the city’s development from the early 1790s, when it was sparsely populated and “completely surrounded with remains of its old revolutionary fortifications,” (21) to the early nineteenth century, when newly erected residences, gardens, and greens redefined the topography. Among “the public improvements and embellishments” noted by Fraser was City Square, “a beautiful walk of shade trees” replacing “mean and densely crowded” buildings that had been “a reproach to the city as well on the score of morals as of taste.” (116) Among the earliest private gardens in the city, Fraser singled out that created by the expatriate British nursery- and seedsman Robert Squibb (author of The Gardener's Calendar for South-Carolina, Georgia, and North-Carolina [1787)]), which later became Rickett’s Circus, as well as the large gardens of Martha Daniell Logan (1704-1779), author of the planting advice column “A Gardener’s Kalendar, and of Colonel Laurens, which occupied an entire city square and connected to Federal Green). (25-27) Among the early public gathering spots noted by Fraser were Gibbes’s Bridge, “where seats and refreshments were provided for the company that used to resort there on warm summer evenings,” and Watson’s Garden, “a beautifully cultivated piece of ground…about a mile from the city, adorned with shrubbery and hedges, and fine umbrageous trees.” (64) Both a botanic garden and a botanic society were instituted, but failed. (67) Fraser also commented on the transformed landscape that resulted from the breaking up of plantations, noting that “the ruinous remains of many of their seats and mansions…are melancholy memorials of bye-gone days.” (58)

--Robyn Asleson

Texts

• 1845, Charles Fraser, "Gardening," (The Charleston Book, 166, 168, 173-74, 177)

"Amidst the blossoms of Eden, and under the shade of its bowers, did woman receive the breath of life, full of joy and fragrance....

"From the earliest ages it [gardening] has been contemporary with national prosperity and popular refinement, and has always flourished together with other elegant arts, possessing this decided advantage over some of them, that, whilst they have obtained their acme of improvement, and could advance no further, science is shedding on horticulture the rays of continued and progressive improvement, and encouraging its votaries with a boundless field of research, and daily results of interest and delight....

"These [the hanging garden of Babylon] were raised in the style of an amphitheatre, on terraces of successive elevation, accessible by flights of steps and supported by immense arches. On these terraces was a sufficient surface of soil for the roots of the largest trees, which flourished there in all the luxuriancy of their native forests, together with the richest variety of flowers and shrubs. The ancient Egyptians, who advanced the arts of civilized life to a degree of refinement which no one can venture to say has been surpassed or equalled in after times, bestowed great care upon their gardens, planning them upon a scale of magnificence, and irrigating them with canals and reservoirs, to ensure a continued luxuriance in their orchards and vineyards....

"Thus, we see that wealth and luxury have always claimed a garden as the favorite object of prodigal expense. But instead of imitating the simplicity of nature, they have too often disfigured her with the motley inventions of art, and loaded her with ornaments which she abhors ; and which, without speech or language," she is constantly reproving, even in the humblest of her productions. It is not in straight walks, clipped hedges, cones and labyrinths, or such caprices, that wealth may successfully employ itself in gardening; but in collecting and naturalizing the kindred productions of various countries and climates, and bringing together, as it were, into one family circle, the scattered members of the same species, in beholding their blended hues, and inhaling their mingled fragrance. In this respect, modern horticulture has a decided advantage over that of antiquity. No one can be a skilful horticulturist, that is unacquainted with botany and other kindred sciences, all of which were unknown to the ancients. Their efforts were practical and experimental; those of the moderns are founded on principle, and directed by a knowledge of the properties of plants and flowers, greatly diversifying the beauty of our gardens, and enlarging the enjoyments of taste. Ours and affinities of plants. The modern horticulturist does not merely regard the ornamental part of gardening, which is very much a matter of taste and observation, but without neglecting that, he has higher objects. He calls Botany and Chemistry to his aid....

"One of the results, we might say one of the triumphs of modern horticulture, is the introduction and naturalisation, even the domestication, of foreign vegetable population is thus greatly increased, and like that of our municipal and political communities, is fast rivalling the number of natives. The extension of commerce, and the growing civilisation of the world, have very much contributed to this. We may all remember when our gardens produced a comparative meagre display, when our roses were few, and those the descendants of the Huguenot stock: and our flower-beds confined to anemonies and stock gillyflowers—pinks, jonquils, and a few blue hyacinths (other colors being very rarely seen), as prescribed by the old-fashioned vocabulary. Whereas they now exhibit a splendid array of flowers and shrubs; contributed by every part of the globe.... Exotics are now familiar to us, and may be fairly enrolled in the American Flora."