Greenville County Museum of Art

Mar 27, 2024 — Sep 8, 2024

Born in China to American missionary parents, Horace Talmage Day (1909 – 1984) graduated from the Shanghai American School and began his formal art training in 1927 at the Art Students League in New York. In 1936, after serving as artist-in-residence at Manhattan’s Henry Street Settlement, Day accepted the position as the first director of the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, Georgia. Five years later, the artist joined the faculty of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. During World War II, Day served as an ambulance driver and cartographer in France from 1943 to 1945. He returned to Mary Baldwin College, where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1967.

A plein air realist, Day helped to extend the Charleston Renaissance into the post-World War II era by modernizing the genre, combining the punch of brilliant colors and textured brushstrokes with the same love of place expressed by Alfred Hutty, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner. His fresh interpretations of Lowcountry subjects documented vibrant city streets and their inhabitants, bucolic landscapes, rural cabins hidden beneath massive oaks, and churches still identifiable today by their distinctive architectural details. Horace Day in the Lowcountry focuses on the artist’s work that was painted over four decades of traveling along the coast—from Charleston to Hilton Head Island.