The Battery is a landmark defensive seawall and promenade in Charleston, South Carolina. Named for a civil-war coastal defense artillery battery at the site, it stretches along the lower shores of the Charleston peninsula, bordered by the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, which meet here to form Charleston harbor. Historically, it has been understood to extend from the beginning of the seawall at the site of the former Omar Shrine Temple to the intersection of what is now Murray Boulevard and King Street. The higher part of the promenade, paralleling East Battery, as the street is known south of Water Street, to the intersection of Murray Boulevard, is known as High Battery. Fort Sumter is visible from the Cooper River side and from the point, as are Castle Pinckney, the World War II aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10), Fort Moultrie, and Sullivan's Island.
Elizabeth O'Neill Verner was an artist, author, lecturer, and preservationist who was one of the leaders of the Charleston Renaissance. She has been called "the best-known woman artist of South Carolina of the twentieth century."
Prentiss Taylor was an American illustrator, lithographer, and painter. Born in Washington D.C., Taylor began his art studies at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed by painting classes under Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and training at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1931, Taylor began studying lithography at the League. Taylor interacted and collaborated with many writers and musicians in his time in New York in the late 1920s and early 30s. This was in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Among his close friends and colleagues were Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.
Anna Catherine Wiley was an American artist active primarily in the early twentieth century. After training with the Art Students League of New York and receiving instruction from artists such as Lloyd Branson and Frank DuMond, Wiley painted a series of impressionist works that won numerous awards at expositions across the Southern United States, and have since been displayed in museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morris Museum of Art. In 1926, Wiley was institutionalized after suffering a mental breakdown, and never painted again.
Florence McClung was an American painter, printmaker, and art teacher. She was the daughter of Charles W. and Minerva (McCoy) White and was born at St. Louis, Missouri, on July 12, 1894. She moved to Dallas in 1899 and lived there until her death. She was related to the Dallas Nine, an influential group of Dallas-based artists.
Rebecca Brewton Motte (1737–1815) was a plantation owner in South Carolina and townhouse owner in its chief city of Charleston. She was known as a patriot in the American Revolution, supplying continental forces with food and supplies for five years. By the end of the war, she had become one of the wealthiest individuals in the state, having inherited property from both her older brother Miles Brewton, who was lost at sea in 1775, and her husband Jacob Motte, who died in 1780.
James West Fraser, better known as West Fraser, was born in Savannah, Georgia. One of the leading American artists in the representational/plein air tradition, Fraser has built his career on richly painted, atmospheric vistas of cities, coasts, and the landscape.
St. Julien Ravenel was an American physician and agricultural chemist. During the American Civil War, he designed the torpedo boat CSS David that was used to attack the Union ironclad USS New Ironsides. Following the war, he helped pioneer the use of fertilizers in agriculture and led the growth of phosphate fertilizer manufacturing in Charleston, South Carolina.
William M. Halsey (1915–1999) was an influential abstract artist in the American Southeast, particularly in his home state of South Carolina. He was represented by the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City (1948–53). His mural studies for the Baltimore Hebrew Congregational Temple were included in Synagogue Art Today at the Jewish Museum, New York City (1952). His work was included in the annual International Exhibition of Watercolors, the Art Institute of Chicago. He had work in the Whitney Museum's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings (1953). A mid-career retrospective was held at the Greenville County Museum of Art in 1972 and then traveled to the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, and the Florence Museum, Florence, South Carolina.
Colonel Dr. Francis Kinloch Huger, a trained physician and artillery officer, was a scion of the Huger family of South Carolina. A member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and South Carolina Senate, he is best known for his leadership of a failed November 1794 attempt to rescue Lafayette from captivity during the wars surrounding the French Revolution.
Gabrielle de Veaux Clements was an American painter, print maker, and muralist. She studied art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in Paris at Académie Julian. Clements also studied science at Cornell University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree. She created murals, painted portraits, and made etchings. Clements taught in Philadelphia and in Baltimore at Bryn Mawr School. Her works have been exhibited in the United States and at the Paris Salon. Clements works are in several public collections. Her life companion was fellow artist Ellen Day Hale.
Mary Harvey Tannahill was an American painter, printmaker, embroiderer and batik maker. She studied in the United States and Europe and spent 30 summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts with the artist colony there. She was instructed by Blanche Lazzell there and assumed the style of the Provincetown Printers. She exhibited her works through a number of artist organizations. A native of North Carolina, she spent much of her career based in New York.
Anna Heyward Taylor was a painter and printmaker who is considered one of the leading artists of the Charleston Renaissance.
Alfred Heber Hutty was a 20th-century American artist who is considered one of the leading figures of the Charleston Renaissance. His oeuvre ranges from impressionist landscape paintings to detailed drawings and prints of life in the South Carolina Lowcountry. He was active in local arts organizations, helping to found both an art school and an etchers' club.
Beatrice Witte Ravenel was an American poet associated with the Charleston Renaissance in South Carolina.
Laura Bragg was a museum director who became the first woman to run a publicly funded art museum in America when she was named the director of the Charleston Museum in 1920. She later directed the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts and advised on the reorganization of the Valentine Museum in Virginia. She is also known for developing a widely copied form of traveling museum exhibition for schools called a "Bragg Box."
The Capers-Motte House is a pre-Revolutionary house at 69 Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina. The house was likely built before 1745 by Richard Capers. Later, the house purchased and became the home of Colonel Jacob Motte, who served as the treasurer of the colony for 27 years until his death in 1770. His son, also named Jacob Motte, married Rebecca Brewton, daughter of goldsmith Robert Brewton and sister of Miles Brewton, a wealthy slave trader.
Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel was an American writer known for her books on the architecture and history of Charleston, South Carolina.
