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Myrtle Beach Collects: Portraits

January 5 - February 26, 2006

Opening reception: Thursday, January 5, 2006 from 5:30-7:30pm

Gallery Talk at 6:30pm by Coastal Carolina University Professor Arne Flaten

Harry Hartshorne
Artist unknown
1923

Pastel on paper

Collection of Harold Hartshorne, Jr.

This pastel portrait of Harold Hartshorne, Jr., “Harry” to his many Myrtle Beach friends, was painted in the spring of 1923. As a four-year-old lad, Harry was dressed in the fashion of the day, the lace-collared, blue-velvet “Little Lord Fauntleroy” suit.

Mr. Hartshorne is the son of the late Marietta Chapin Hartshorne and the late Harold Hartshorne, Sr. He is the grandson of Simeon Brooks Chapin and Elizabeth Mattocks Chapin of Chicago, New York City, Southern Pines, NC, and Myrtle Beach, SC. Mr. Chapin was one of the pioneer developers of Myrtle Beach. With the untimely death of his young mother, Mr. Hartshorne was raised by his maternal grandparents until his father remarried Mary Bryan of Augusta, GA. His stepmother Mary, who was out of sight, was holding him during the sittings for this portrait.

This portrait is unsigned and the only recollection about the artist is that he was a popular children’s portraitist in New York City during this period.

Mr. Hartshorne reflected on the place for his portrait sitting: his family resided at 161 East 79th Street, New York, NY. The building remains today. He recalls that spring in 1923 when his stepmother Mary and he sat on the fire escape on the 10th floor of the north side of the building. This was to provide the best light for the portraitist. His father purchased the apartment in 1916, where he and Marietta made their home there until her death in 1920.

Although a resident of Lake Geneva, WI, on the Chapin family farm established by his grandfather, Simeon, Harry frequently returns to Myrtle Beach, residing at Lands End during his visits. He has served on the Board of Directors of both the Burroughs & Chapin Company and the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum. He continues his patronage of the local cultural and fine arts.

Simeon and “Bessie” Chapin were very influential in their grandson’s interest in the arts and in community involvement. Harry’s quiet leadership in both Lake Geneva and Myrtle Beach is reflected in programs with the YMCA, the Episcopal Church and various community institutions established by Mr. Chapin.

Edy-ith at Lang Syne

Bradford Perrin

1937, March 24

Graphite on paper

Collection of Genevieve Chandler Peterkin

The Grand Strand holds many stories of loss from the ravages of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, but this delicate drawing is a symbol of survival.   Genevieve Chandler Peterkin had been overwhelmed by the destruction of treasured artwork, books and papers in her Murrells Inlet home, when she turned over this framed drawing lying face down in the awful mud left behind.   She could scarcely believe the calm, undamaged face looking back at her.

The portrait had been given to Peterkin by her famed mother-in-law, Pulitzer-prize-winning author Julia Peterkin.   Edy-ith lived with her aunt Julia Hart at Lang Syne, the Peterkin family plantation near Fort Motte, SC, and had been sketched on a March day in the hard-scrabble year of 1937 by Bradford Perrin, a family friend visiting from New York.   When Genevieve Peterkin went to live at Lang Syne with her husband Bill in the late 1950s, she was shocked.   In her memoir Heaven Is a Beautiful Place she wrote:   “…on Lang Syne black families were still living in the cabins slaves had occupied.   Nothing had changed.   Same plantation street and many of the same things happening on that street.”   Peterkin, her husband and her stepson worked to change those conditions; they improved and built new homes and purchased additional acreage to sell as affordable building sites for African-American families who wanted to own their own homes.  

Edy-ith and Genevieve Peterkin never met.   The 1940s brought change to farming in the South with the advent of motorized equipment, and many African-American farm workers moved north for better paying factory jobs.   The black population of Lang Syne went from more than 500 individuals when Julia Peterkin first went there as a bride, to fewer than 30 workers and their families when her daughter-in-law Genevieve Chandler Peterkin became “mistress” of the plantation.   Though Edy-ith had moved on, the legacy of her gaze remains.   

Mrs. Robert O. Jones

William Franklin Draper (1912-2003)

1976

Oil on canvas

Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Robert O. Jones

The setting was a New York City Park Avenue studio in 1976. The artist, William F. Draper, was at the pinnacle of his profession, regarded by many as “the dean of American portrait painters.”   Those who sat for him comprised a dazzling list, including his boyhood friend John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Paul Mellon, the Shah of Iran. But this sitting was more intimate. The subject, now Mrs. Robert O. Jones of Pawleys Island, SC, was his dear second cousin Margaret, and they delighted in each other's company.   Because this was back in the days of New York's famous “martini lunches,” they would leave the studio to engage in that repast and then return to work with much laughter and joking.

With Margaret, Draper could make sure he got it just right.  The first day she wore a yellow dress. Draper

had declared the dress “okay,” but after painting it, he decided it wouldn't do. Margaret switched to her blue and white “Diane von Furstenberg,” the “must-have” fashion statement for that decade. But, once he had painted over the first dress, Draper decided the pattern of the second too distracting. Margaret suggested her other “von Furstenberg”—her white one.  Not satisfied to merely paint over the pattern, Draper had to see Margaret in white to paint her thus.

Draper then faced the challenge of Margaret's mouth.   Mrs. Jones recalls:

Just before finishing the portrait on Friday, he was working on the mouth and said, “I can't do it! I'll just have to paint it straight.” I said, “You have to put the smile in; you've already got it in the eyes.” He went back to work, and all of a sudden something clicked inside him. He painted a few more strokes, and it was done! It was like watching a little miracle happen.

Julia Chapin Orr (LaBruce)
George Aid (1872-1938)
1915, May 8
Oil on canvas
Collection of Angela and Laurence LaBruce

Julia Chapin Orr was just five years old when she sat with so much dignity for her cousin’s artist husband, George Aid. Aid and his wife, Mary Orr of Anderson, SC, had lived the bohemian lives of American expatriates in Europe, but their idyllic lifestyle was abruptly ended by the advent of World War I. Fortuitously, in the spring of 1914, the couple had returned to the States upon the death of Aid’s father. They arrived carrying paintings and etchings for exhibitions in Boston and St. Louis, not knowing they would never again return to Europe. Eventually they purchased a vineyard in Tryon, NC, where Aid made important contributions to the remarkably vital art colony there, as well as in Charlotte where he was highly sought after for his portraits. Michael McCue, Aid’s biographer, believes the artist was DuBose Heyward’s inspiration for his novel Lost Morning.

Julia Chapin Orr (1910-1980) grew up to become the wife of Laurence LaBruce, Sr. The LaBruce family has owned and operated LaBruce Nursery in this area for four generations. Like cousin Mary Orr Aid, Julia spent her childhood in Anderson, SC, where the displaced Aid couple often stayed with Mary’s family until moving to Tryon in 1919. It is easy to see how young Julia’s countenance and demeanor could captivate the artistic eye of George Aid.

Mother and Child
Ming Qin
2002
Oil on canvas
Collection of Tweed McElveen-Bogache and Pendleton Bogache

Certainly the most arresting sight in McElveen Designs and Antiques in Pawleys Island is the portrait of owner-designer Tweed McElveen-Bogache and her daughter Pendleton, which dominates one wall in this emporium of “casual elegance.”

The artist Ming Qin, a native of central China where he received his formal art training, now resides in Ontario, Canada. When he was commissioned by the Bogache family, he came to Myrtle Beach and lived with them for a week. He went everywhere they went—dining out, plays, the beach—whatever it took to get to know this mother and daughter in a way that would enhance his vision of the pair.

It’s easy to understand why the Bogaches would choose Ming Qin to make such a personal statement. In 1994, he won first place in the prestigious annual competition of the American Society of Portrait Painters. His portraits grace the walls of more than a dozen universities, including Harvard, Duke and Vanderbilt. His classical training and talent have resulted in a style reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler or John Singer Sargent, particularly in regard to his skill in capturing the subtle nuances of white fabric. He has also done an exquisite portrait of Tweed’s mother, Madeline McElveen, which hangs in the D.C. home of her daughter Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, Chairman of the Board of the American National Red Cross.

As intimated in the portrait by her slippers, Pendleton Bogache loves ballet, but she is particularly accomplished as a pianist and has played for the President of Latvia, for retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and for guests of the former Ambassador to Finland, who was also her “Aunt Bonnie.”

Talulah Lemmon (McInvaill)
Charles Mason Crowson (1916-1973)
1943
Oil on canvas
Collection of Alice McInvaill Estes

Nineteen hundred and forty three must have been an exciting time for Talulah Lemmon. In that banner year, this exquisite painting was unveiled, and her second volume of poetry, On the Wing, soon followed with glowing reviews. Just one year earlier, at the age of 22, she had published First Flight, a slim volume of poetry which was enthusiastically reviewed and quickly sold out. Her beloved aunt, Sadie Dusenberry Clark of Conway, so proud of her accomplished niece, commissioned the young Sumter-born artist Charles Mason Crowson to paint the successful poetess. Alice must have felt that in spite of World War II life could be wonderful; she was young, beautiful, successfully writing and publishing poetry—and even in love, with a naval ensign stationed in Charleston. Ensign Henry Clemson McInvaill, Jr., a native of Conway where Talulah Lemmon also was born, was soon to become her husband.

This talented couple went on to establish several landmark businesses. In the 1940s they operated the Pink House Galleries with artist Alice Ravenel Huger Smith in downtown Charleston, where they displayed the works of prominent South Carolina artists, including Charles Mason Crowson, and Charleston notables such as Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, William Halsey and Alice R. H. Smith, for whom one of the couple’s daughters, collector Alice McInvaill Estes, was named. Mrs. Estes fondly recalls playing in the revered artist’s study and bouncing on her porch joggling board. The McInvaills later moved to the Myrtle Beach area where they helped open the famed Pink House Restaurant on Kings Highway, which evolved into other businesses and was only recently demolished to make way for condominiums.

Later as a painter, a mother, a school teacher and then a noted batik artist, Talulah Lemmon McInvaill (1920-2001) continued to add to her list of talents. But when one looks at this portrait, one sees a captivating young lady blooming with the possibilities of the life ahead.

Dr. Edward J. Woodhouse

F. Thompson

Year unknown

Oil on canvas

Collection of Coastal Carolina University

Dr. Edward J. Woodhouse (1884-1963) was the director of Coastal Carolina University when it opened its doors on September 20, 1954, as Coastal Carolina Junior College. Actually, there were no doors to open; the initial classes were held after-hours in Conway High School. This first institution of higher learning in Horry County was the vision of Horry Country School Superintendent Thurman Anderson, who was concerned about the lack of degreed teachers in the County, the financial inability of students to leave the area for further education and the lack of options for training a work force.   In July of 1954, Anderson brought together a group of community leaders and visionaries to voice his concerns, and at that very meeting the group decided to proceed with creating a junior college. They formed a foundation to govern and finance the institution and pledged their own financial resources.

The group invited the University of South Carolina to nurture this ambitious project, but the University declined. Dr. Woodhouse of Chapel Hill, NC, along with his wife, Dr. Margaret Woodhouse, was employed to teach and administer. The 70-year-old educator had just retired from the faculty of the University of North Carolina, after a career that also included stints at Yale and Smith College. The Woodhouses served in the administrative capacity for one year, when the College of Charleston agreed to oversee the new institution for three years only. Dr. Woodhouse was replaced by Dr. George Rogers from the College of Charleston, but he remained for three more years as academic director.  Coastal Carolina officials say it is impossible to calculate Dr. Woodhouse's contributions to the initial success of the school, adding that “his distinction as a scholar and teacher, his dedication to students, and his deep sense of purpose gave sustenance and inspiration to the fledgling endeavor.”  

The University has no information about the artist F. Thompson, nor knowledge of when the portrait was painted. Viewers may find the depiction of Dr. Woodhouse holding a cigarette unusual, but it represents an accepted part of mid-twentieth century lifestyle.