A Project of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art
History of Early American Landscape Design

Charles Fraser

[http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/research/casva/research-projects.html A Project of the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts ]

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. [1] 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. [2] A sketchbook begun in 1796 and completed in 1806 contains Fraser’s copies of European prints as well as 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. __]. [3] 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. __]. [4] Fraser's portraits of Charleston-area plantations, churches, and monuments were clearly influenced by the European prints he collected, such as representations of stately English manor houses and engravings after the atmospheric landscapes of the seventeenth-century painters Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine. Fraser also took care to note details of terrain, plant life, and architecture specific to Charleston.< 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. [5] Descriptions of landscape scenery recur in his letters home. On his second trip through the northeast in 1816, he observed of northern Connecticut, “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.” [6] That year 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. [7] Despite the financial success of these landscapes, Fraser shifted his focus to portrait miniatures when he embarked on his professional career as a painter in 1818. It is for these miniatures (which include an estimated 400 portraits of Charlestonians) that he is chiefly known today.


In the 1830s — with his patrons’ interest in portraits dwindling, a school of American landscape painting emerging, and his eyesight deteriorating — Fraser shifted his attention back to landscape. Now, however, rather than the cultivated grounds of local plantations and country seats, Fraser focused on depictions of wild New England scenery (executed in watercolor and, occasionally, in oil) as well as imagined European landscapes and copies after engravings.[8] His admiration for both the cultivated European landscape and untamed American nature found expression in two poems he published in The Magnolia, or Southern Appalachian: "Claude Lorraine" (May 1843) and "Nature Made for Man" (June 1843). [9]; Two years later, he published an essay tracing the history of gardens from Eden to the present day in the literary miscellany The Charleston Book. [10] He served as a trustee of the College of Charleston (1817-1860) and director of the South Carolina Academy of Fine Arts (1821-1828).


Over 300 miniature portraits and 150 sketches of landscape and other subjects landscapes were assembled in an exhibition organized by the Rev. Samuel and Caroline Gilman in Charleston in February and March 1857. [11]


Conscious of the great changes Charleston had undergone in his lifetime, 71-year-old Fraser presented his personal recollections to the Conversation Club in 1853, subsequently publishing his lecture in the Charleston Courier and then revising and expanding it as Reminiscences of Charleston (1854). [12] 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,” 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.” [13] Although a botanic garden and a botanic society had failed to prosper, Fraser mentioned several noteworthy private gardens, among them those created by the expatriate British nursery- and seedsman Robert Squibb (author of The Gardener's Calendar for South-Carolina, Georgia, and North-Carolina [1787)]) and Martha Daniell Logan (1704-1779), author of the planting advice column “A Gardener’s Kalendar." [14] He also noted early public gathering spots, such as 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.” [15] New buildings and streets had obliterated the greens that had once been a distinctive feature of Charleston, and many families had broken up their plantations so that, Fraser noted, “the ruinous remains of many of their seats and mansions...are melancholy memorials of bye-gone days.” [16]


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, 


--Robyn Asleson

Texts

  • 1854, Describing the city of Charleston (Reminiscences of Charleston, pp. 25-28) [17]
"There was a word then [1807], and for some years afterwards, known in our topography, now no longer used, to wit: a green--to denote large, vacant spaces along the margin of the town.... There was Bouquet's green, immediaterly in front of the house lately occupied by John Hume, Esq., and extending to the west and south-west to tide water; Harleston's green, extending north of it to a considerable distance; then a large space immediately west of the Poor-house square, used as a negro burial ground, where the old magazine stood, to which the present Magazine-street led directly.
"I must not omit to mention Gadsden's green, which was a large vacant space surrounding the residence of General Gadsden, with a portico in front, which used to be the favourite seat of its venerable owner in summer....
"There was Savage's green at the lower end of Broad-street, which...was entirely vacant, and spacious enough to be used for military exercise. The old battalion often paraded and fired their pieces there.... There was also a green at the lower end of Broad-street, covering the present site of Mr. Trapman's lot, and part of Mrs. Khone's garden. The first circus we ever had in Charleston was put up there by a rider named Poole.... Then there was Federal green, a large vacant lot in the north-east part of the town, adjoining Colonel Laurens's garden--which garden occupied the entire square enclosed by the Bay, Society, and Anson-streets. The only existing memorial of the locality of Federal green is Wall-street, as I remember a brick wall that ran along one of the sides of it, from which it, no doubt, took its name, as College and Green-streets are now the only memorial of our old College green.
"There was another vacant lot or green, on the south side of Tradd-street.... It was said to have been used, after the surrender of Charleston, as a parade ground for the Hessians."


  • 1845, "Gardening," (The Charleston Book, pp. 166, 168, 173-74, 177) [18]
"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."

Images

References

Notes

  1. Martha R. Severens and Charles L. Wyrick, Jr., eds., ‘’Charles Fraser of Charleston: Essays on the Man, His Art and His Times’’ (Charleston, S.C.: Carolina Art Association , 1983), 16, view on Zotero.
  2. Roberta Sokolitz, “Picturing the Plantation,” in ‘’Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art’’, ed. Angela E. Mack and Stephen G. Hoffius (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina, 2008), 30, 39, 45, view on Zotero; Roberta Kefalos, “Landscapes of Thomas Coram and Charles Fraser,” American Art Review’’, (May/June 1998): 122-27, view on Zotero.
  3. Severens, 77-78; Fraser and Smith, 1959, 18, 38, view on Zotero.
  4. Charles Fraser and Alice R. Huger Smith, ‘’A Charleston Sketchbook, 1796-1806’’ (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E.Tuttle Company for the Carolina Art Association, 1959), 8, 19, 21, view on Zotero.
  5. Severens, 16-17, 32; Rutledge, Anna Wells, Artists in the Life of Charleston: Through Colony and State, from Restoration to Reconstruction , Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1949), 133-34, view on Zotero.
  6. Severens, 87.
  7. Anon., "Domestic Literature and Fine Arts," Analectic Magazine and Naval Chronicle, 8 (1816), 453, view on Zotero.
  8. Severens, 75-76.
  9. Charles Fraser, "Claude Lorraine" and "Nature Made for Man," The Magnolia, or Southern Appalachian, 2, n.s. (May 1843): 315 and (June 1843): 383. Both re-published in William Gilmore Simms, ed., The Charleston Book: A Miscellany in Prose and Verse, ed. William Gilmore Simms (Charleston, SC: Samuel Hart, Sen., 1845), 46, 332, view on Zotero.
  10. Charles Fraser, "Gardening," in Simms 1845), 165-80, view on Zotero.
  11. Gilman, Samuel, Catalogue of Miniature Portraits, Landscapes, and Other Pieces, Executed by Charles Fraser, Esq., and Exhibited in ‘The Fraser Gallery,’ at Charleston, during the Months of February and March, 1857. Accompanied by Occasional Annotations, and a Compendious Sketch of the Life and Career of the Artist (Charleston: James and Williams, 1857); Rutledge, 49, 134-35, view on Zotero.
  12. Charles Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: J. Russell, 1854), 3, view on Zotero.
  13. Fraser, 1854, 21, 116, view on Zotero.
  14. Fraser, 1854, 25-27, 67, view on Zotero.
  15. Fraser, 1854, 64, view on Zotero.
  16. Fraser, 1854, 25-28, 58, view on Zotero.
  17. Fraser, 1854, view on Zotero
  18. Fraser, 1845, view on Zotero

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