1 vol. book: Charleston architecture Smith, Alice R. Huger and D. E. Huger Smith. THE DWELLING HOUSES OF CHARLESTON SOUTH CAROLINA. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1917. Limited first edition, signed by author "Alice R. Huger Smith, Studio, 34 Chalmers St., March 21st 1919."

Other Notes: What is known as the Charleston renaissance, a period between about 1915 and 1940, was inspired by local artists and spurred the citizens of Charleston to make use of their greatest assets - what a local newspaper called "beauty, tradition and romance" - to commemorate their past and chart their future. One of the leading artists in the movement was Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, a descendant of several distinguished families, who considered "poverty the inheritance of the land in which I dwelt." She learned from the prints of the Japanese ukiyo-e school, which she studied intensively, absorbing their formats, colors, and reverence for nature. Alice Smith's only real mentor was the tonalist painter Lowell Birge Harrison, who spent several winters in Charleston beginning in 1908. He and his wife stayed at the Villa Margherita, a stylish inn near the harbor that was also frequented by Eleanor Roosevelt and the writers Sinclair Lewis and Gertrude Stein. Harrison loved the moonlit views seen from the villa, but there was no space for a studio. Smith came to the rescue with the offer of one of the old buildings behind her family's house, and the two artists became friends. With Harrison's encouragement Smith indulged her propensity for soft-edged atmospheric landscapes. In 1917 Smith and her father, D. E. H. Smith (1846-1932), published THE DWELLING HOUSES OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, which was the seminal volume of the Charleston renaissance. Her evocative line drawings of houses and streetscapes and her father's text instilled Charlestonians with pride in their architectural heritage. In 1931 a local newspaper alleged that "more than any other single factor [the book] has inspired and influenced the renaissance of the old houses that has taken place during the last ten years."