In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740-1860

In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740-1860. By Maurie D. McInnis in collaboration with Angela D. Mack. With essays by J. Thomas Savage, Robert A. Leath, and Susan Ricci Stebbins. (Columbia: Published by the University of South Carolina Press for the Gibbes Museum of Art with the cooperation of the Historic Charleston Foundation, c. 1999. Pp. xxii, 348. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 1-57003-315-3; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 1-57003-314-5.) In Pursuit of Refinement–an exhibition catalogue that is a joint project of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston and the Historic Charleston Foundation–is the first major study of Charleston’s romance with Britain and Europe. The authors claim that, more than any other colonial and antebellum city in America, Charleston retained close ties to Europe through trade, the education of its privileged sons abroad, and the tradition of the Grand Tour. These essays explore some of the economic, political, and social factors that made Europe “Charleston’s cultural fountainhead, perhaps more than … any other American city” (p. 10) and examine how this allegiance helped to create an identity peculiar to Charleston. As Eliza Lucas Pinckney phrased it in 1740, “[t]he people [of Charleston] live very Gentile and very much in the English taste” (p. 55). Her words have served as a banner of Charleston uniqueness ever since. The authors rather cursorily rely on the similarity in the social stratification of the two societies to explain the disposition of these elite southerners to mimic the tastes and patterns of consumption of their European counterparts. They set out to prove Charleston exceptionalism visually, however, by highlighting the objects that travelers acquired for their elegant homes in Charleston. The authors describe in 146 catalogue entries portraits commissioned from Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Singleton Copley, and George Romney; paintings of mythological subjects by Angelica Kauffman and landscapes by Salvator Rosa; Renaissance drawings by Leonardo da Vinci; neoclassical drawings by Wilhelm Tischbein; Grand Tour vedute by various artists; portrait miniatures; British high-style furniture; London silver and French porcelains; and such primary documentary materials as travel journals and picture inventories (pp. 89-334). The book’s greatest value probably resides in the documentation of these objects, the result of a prodigious research effort by the scholars and curators that included a two-year survey conducted across Europe and the United States to locate paintings with a Charleston provenance. Most of the other objects are from the collections of the Gibbes Museum, the Historic Charleston Foundation, and other South Carolina institutions, or remain in the possession of descendants of Charleston’s original “who’s who”: the Smiths, Manigaults, Middletons, Izards, and Pinckneys. Other essays discuss the history of collectors and collecting in Charleston, including Charlestonians’ unparalleled patronage of English portrait artists–a fascinating and little known chapter in the history of American art–and wealthy Charleston merchants’ shopping sprees for decorative and fine arts. The book concludes with an informative account of John Izard Middleton, whose cultural work as an archaeologist, watercolorist, book and painting collector, and amateur architect placed him in the vanguard of Charleston’s refined European-educated connoisseurs. The authors unfortunately do not situate Charleston within a national or international context in which the pursuit of refinement and gentility was widespread (in this regard, see Richard L. Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities [New York, 1992]). They instead take a familiar story and, using many previously unpublished primary sources, present it from a Charleston point-of-view. This strategy gives Charleston the place it deserves at the national cultural table but that success comes at the expense of issues that, had the authors delved deeper, would have produced a richer, more nuanced argument.