Edwin Harleston
Edwin Augustus Harleston (March 14, 1882 – May 10, 1931)[1] was an American artist and founding president of the Charleston, South Carolina, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
[3][4] His mother traced her lineage through several generations of free people of color, while his father was descended from a white planter and one of his slaves.
His then girlfriend (later wife), Elise Forrest, moved to Long Island, working as a teacher, to be close to him until he returned home to Charleston in 1917.
[7] He became active in local civil rights groups and in 1917 rose to be president of Charleston's newly formed branch of the NAACP.
[5] Being from one of the few Black elite families in Charleston, South Carolina at the time, Edwin Harleston attended a private school called the Avery Normal Institute.
However, Harvard forced him to register as an undergrad, noting that his "Negro college" was not a valid enough education to study painting at the graduate level and he decided instead to apply to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Boston's surplus of art museums, affording a level of access he did not experience in his home town of Charleston, allowed Harleston to develop his style and techniques inspired from artists such as Rembrandt.
He mostly painted portraits, often on commission, and his sitters included notables such as Grace Towns, who later became the first African-American woman elected to the Georgia General Assembly; philanthropist Pierre S. du Pont; and Edward Twitchell Ware, a former president of Atlanta University.
[2][8][12] Harleston struggled to maintain a consistent artistic career while working for his father but returned to art in his thirties after meeting Elise Forrest.
[5] He also painted genre scenes of the daily life of Charleston's African-American citizens, especially its rising middle class, as well as landscapes of South Carolina Lowcountry.
[4] Out of step with the rising modernism of the 1920s, he saw himself as continuing in the tradition of Henry Ossawa Tanner by portraying Black people and their lives realistically instead of as caricatures or stereotypes.
Du Bois as the "leading portrait painter of the race" even though his responsibility for helping to run the funeral home meant he could never devote himself to being an artist full-time.
A three-quarter length seated portrait in dark colors and muted light, the painting exemplifies Harleston's commitment to portraying his sitters with dignity.
[2][8] In 1930, Harleston painted Douglas's portrait with the unfinished mural in the background, typically emphasizing the sitter's profession and character while avoiding any suggestion of the picturesque.
[8][13] Despite this modest success, Harleston was largely excluded from the dominantly white artistic circles of the Charleston Renaissance with which his work is today associated.
