I owe my curiosity about the American plein air realist Horace Talmage Day, to the Facebook algorithm. At some point in the spring, the algorithm put together my affection for Greenville, South Carolina with my love of art. Up popped the Greenville County Museum of Art. While the GCMA is “home to the world’s largest public collection of watercolors by Andrew Wyeth,” what drew my attention that particular evening was the promotion for the GCMA’s 2024 exhibit Horace Day in the Lowcountry. The soft pastel-like brushstrokes and captivating use of color and light to depict South Carolina landscapes, buildings, and people drew me in. Simply put, I thought the sampling of Horace Day’s paintings was beautiful. The biographical snippet noted that Day was born in China in 1909 and in1927 graduated from the Shanghai American School, the same school that many decades later my children would compete against in athletic leagues in Asia. Intrigued, I began reading about Day, viewing his paintings on the Web, and planning a visit to the GCMA exhibit.
The exhibit’s introductory panel described Horace Day as “an important chronicler and promoter of life and art in the American South.” Dr. Adrienne Childs, a renowned curator and art historian wrote in 2010, “Day’s work is emblematic of the spirit of regionalism that emerged in American art in the 1930s.”
From a relatively young age Day enjoyed success. He was not yet 30 years old when a 1938 catalog essay for the exhibit Sea Island Country Water Colors by Horace Day, held at New York City’s prestigious Macbeth Gallery, observed of him, “[h]e comprehended what he saw, and in his water colors [sic] recorded, with neither sentimentality nor bravura the poetry and beauty of the scene. … [He] has kept himself and his method in the background while revealing the essence of the place—its sense of remoteness, of timelessness, of a stillness so piercing that it is like some hitherto unknown quality of sound.”
For almost 10 years, starting at the age of 24, Day was represented by and had multiple solo and group exhibitions at the Macbeth Gallery. The gallery itself made such a “significant contribution to art in America” that records comprising “almost complete coverage of the gallery's operations from its inception in1892 to its closing in 1953” are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Day, who worked primarily in watercolors and oils, was only about 30 years old when his 1938 painting Live Oak, Beaufort, South Carolina, was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair. During his life, his work, including paintings from his service in WWII, was exhibited at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art as well London’s National Gallery of Art.
My reading about Horace Day included well-researched essays written by his son Tal Day, who is the administrator of his parents’ art estates and has access to his father’s notes, letters, and interviews. From Tal Day’s essays, I learned that Horace Day’s choice of subjects for his regionalist paintings and how he painted those subjects, including his respectful portraits of African Americans, was influenced by his experiences growing up in China in the early 20th century.
In an essay for a 2016 exhibit of his father’s art, Tal Day wrote, “[Horace] Day perceived the Lowcountry as a whole. … Because of his upbringing he was not bound by Southern stereotypes or a restricted view of what might be beautiful. He was open to the beauty and connections among features of the Lowcountry culture and landscape that many others did not see.”
Indeed, the1938 essay that accompanied the Macbeth Gallery’s Sea Island Country Water Colors exhibit wondered whether Day’s “[q]uite different… approach [is] due perhaps to his having spent the first eighteen years of his life in another ageless land— China.”
Horace Day himself had said in a 1979 interview, “‘[m]y very early associations have had a subtle influence on what I paint.’” According to Tal Day, the South China landscape had a lasting impact on his father and was “reflected in his work… throughout his career.”
Horace Day was born in Amoy/Xiamen, Fujian Province, China in1909, about 65 years after the establishment of a commercial port there. His mother and father were American missionaries with the Dutch Reformed Church. According to a paper I found on the Amoy Mission of the Reformed Church, Horace’s parents ideally would have had months of training in Mandarin before departing the USA. After arriving in China, they would have received two years of instruction in the Amoy dialect, though the needs of the mission sometimes made this later part impossible for the missionaries.
As a very young boy, Horace Day lived on the small island of Kulangsu/Gulangyu, which faces Xiamen. Kulangsu was established as an international settlement in 1903. In 2017, UNESCO designated it an Historic International Settlement. According to UNESCO, Kulangsu “was an important window for Sino-foreign exchanges [and] is an exceptional example of the cultural fusion that emerged from these exchanges.” Horace and his parents later lived at the mission in Changchow/Zhangzhou, which was west of Amoy.
Tal Day writes that his father Horace Day, like other children of missionary parents, “was both unusually free and obligated to develop interests on his own.” Horace Day began painting at a young age and by the time he was 12 years old, “was painting quite accomplished landscapes of South China scenes in both oil and watercolor.” He “lavishly illustrated” the letters he sent to his parents from the Shanghai American School where he was a boarding student from the age of eight.
After graduating from SAS, Horace Day studied painting at the prestigious New York City Arts Student League. While a student at the League, Day received three Tiffany Foundation fellowships and had one of his paintings in an Art Institute of Chicago exhibition. He went on to have an art residency at the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, to be a director of an art institute in Georgia, and to teach at the college level in Virginia. After his retirement from teaching, he continued to paint and travel, including out West as one of the artists "commissioned [by the US government] to depict the effect of the [reclamation] bureau’s … projects on the landscape of the West.”
In his 2016 essay, Tal Day wrote that his father was well liked, possessed “good humor and [an] infectious laugh” and he “relished meeting and talking with people as he painted outdoors.” He quotes his father from a 1979 interview, “‘I feel happiest when I am working. The more I paint, the more I want to paint.'”
Horace Day’s initial exposure to the South, and specifically to the Lowcountry of South Carolina (generally the area from Charleston to Hilton Head), which he would grow to love and which would become a major focus of his paintings, occurred in 1936, when at about 28 years old (about two years before the Sea Island exhibit), he moved to Augusta, Georgia to become the first director of the Gertrude Herbert Art Institute. While there, he traveled to Beaufort, South Carolina.
Horace Day wrote of the Lowcounty: “‘[t]he landscape here is so luxuriant that it reminds me a lot of south China.’” Tal Day notes that his father saw similarities between the “rustic cabins” where African Americans were living and the “villages and peasant farms that he had found appealing when he was living in Changchow.” Tal Day observes his father was drawn to Charleston, which he painted frequently, in part because it reminded him of the 19th century colonial architecture on Kulangsu/Gulangyu.
In addition to his paintings of rural landscapes, urban scenes, churches, and other buildings, Horace Day is also lauded for his portraits of African Americans. According to Dr. Childs, who is the 2022 recipient of the Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History awarded by Atlanta’s High Museum, Horace Day became interested in African Americans “as a subject of portraiture during his years” on the faculty of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, where he taught for more than 20 years. In 2010 she wrote that, it was while he was painting street scenes in Alexandria, Virginia (he had moved there after his retirement from Mary Baldwin College) that Day “encountered the young Alexandrians that would become the subjects of the remarkable series of portraits featured in the exhibit Style and Identity [Black Alexandria in the 1970s, Portraits by Horace Day.]” The exhibit was held at the Alexandria Black History Museum in 2010.
In an introduction to the exhibit, the museum’s director approvingly distinguished Horace Day from other artists, noting specifically that Day “appreciated the dignity and beauty of his subjects at a time when African Americans were not considered by the majority as suitable subject matter for art.” Similarly, Dr. Childs wrote in 2010, “Horace Day demonstrated a high level of consciousness of the history and politics of representing blacks, as well as the social and psychological impact that the prevailing standards of beauty in America had on some people of color.” She quotes from Day’s notes, “‘as long as Whites were conditioned not to see Blacks as attractive it [made] separation of the races much easier.’”
In a 2010 essay for the exhibit, Tal Day queried whether a connection exists between his father’s respectful portraits and his childhood abroad. He observed that in photos taken when Horace and Horace’s parents were in China [in the early 20th century], “t]he Day family looked remarkably Chinese … [because, as Horace had explained,] the portraits had been retouched by their Chinese photographers to make their subjects more handsome—more Chinese.” Tal Day wrote in 2010, “[a]s I now reflect, I wonder if that early exposure to racial stereotypes of good looks is yet another feature of Horace Day’s upbringing in China that shaped his development as an artist.”
When I consider Horace Day, I am struck by the fullness of his experiences and his contributions. It is easy to understand why it was said of Day, "[his] work celebrates the delights of seeing, and his sight embraces a variety of subjects that can be attempted by few painters."
While Horace Day in the Lowcountry has closed, the GCMA website still features the exhibition promotion material as well as information from its 2016 Horace Day exhibit. The exhibit catalog is also available. The portraits featured in the 2010 exhibit Style and Identity can be viewed online in the PDF of the essays about the exhibit. Brown University has a vast online repository of Day’s works from WWII. (Choose the high- resolution viewing option.) The links to those sites, as well as to the materials I rely on and quote from, can be found here.
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