Josephine Sibley
Couper -- J. L. Sibley Jennings, Jr. Josephine Sibley was born 125 years ago in Augusta, Georgia. She was the fifteenth - and last - child of Josiah Sibley, and the fourth by his second wife Emma Eve Longstreet. She was given the name Emma Josephine Sibley at birth, but "Emma" was decisively dropped as soon as she was of age to state her preference. She was henceforth known as "Josephine", "Josie", "Jo", or, depending upon one's status and relationship, either "Miss Sibley" or "Miss Josephine" -- until her marriage to Butler King Couper. Thereafter Mrs. B. King Couper was known professionally as J. S. Couper. Entire generations grew to maturity reverentially addressing her as "Aunt Jo" without any knowledge of her deliberately discarded pre-fix. Josephine Sibley's family was prominent in the development of Southern industry, education and politics. They were a devoutly religious family active in the Augusta churches as well as missionary programs in Asia and Africa. Jo Sibley's extended and extensive family were crucially influential in the character, sensitivity and determination of the future artist. Her father Josiah Sibley [1808-1888] was a merchant-industrialist, and one of Augusta's leading citizens. He was born in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, but moved to Hamburg, S.C. and Augusta, Georgia, at age 13 to join his two older brothers Royal and Amory in their mercantile business. Augusta was then a frontier town of 6000 inhabitants, a promising gateway to America's westward development, and still occupied by Indian tribes camped next to the settlers' homes. He began by selling pocket knives and fishing tackle; two years later he progressed to oranges. Thereafter he prospered, then revisited New England to return with his first wife, Sarah Ann Crapon, of Providence, Rhode Island. She gave him eleven children before her death in 1858, all of whom became prominent in their respective fields of commerce, medicine and religion, some moving westward to Alabama, Louisiana and California. Josiah's business acumen and absolute integrity attracted increasing numbers of associates and investors. His enterprises grew and encompassed cotton factorage, textile manufactures, mercantile establishments, shipping (primarily to England and Europe), banks, railroads and real estate -- from Georgia and South Carolina to Mississippi and Ohio. Jo Sibley's mother was Emma Eve Longstreet [1826-1898]. A native Augustan, her family included ministers, planters, doctors, journalists and educators. Emma's maternal grandfather was Oswell Eve [1754-1829] a Philadelphia sea captain who married a Charleston ship-builder's daughter, abandoned the sea for his first plantation "Middleton" and eventually moved to Augusta in 1800, where the last of his fifteen children were born. Emma's paternal grandfather was William Longstreet [1760-1814] father of five children and an inventor who developed steam powered ships and cotton gins years before Robert Fulton and Eli Whitney. In 1788 William Longstreet received the first and only patent ever issued by Georgia for his creative and exploratory work with steamboats. His boats plowed the Savannah River with mixed success, and the odd new craft earned him the derisive ditty: "Can
you row the boat ashore, Billy-boy, Billy-boy? Emma Eve Longstreet's father Gilbert was an adventurer who went on the campaign to Mexico, helped settle Texas, and died there. Both the Eve and Longstreet families took over the children's welfare. Their mother's sister Sarah Eve (Mrs. John Adams) raised three of the children as her own, and Judge Augustus B. Longstreet directed the education of his brothers' orphaned children including Emma Eve and James, the future Confederate general. The Augusta homes of the close-knit families were subject to rounds of extended visits by near relations and in-laws, whose partisan interests encompassed the religious, financial, social and political development of the new frontier, from railroads to universities -- and art. Among Emma Eve Longstreet's immediate kin were many Southern activists of consequence in her life. Uncle A. B. Longstreet was a jurist; minister; the author of Georgia Scenes, America's first book of native humor; and the President of (then) Emory College, the University of South Carolina, Centennial College (Louisiana), and the University of Mississippi. It is probably he who was most influential to Emma and her children regarding religion, education, literature and justice. Great-uncle Christopher FitzSimons was a prominent merchant, while Uncle Paul FitzSimons Eve was a founder of the Medical Colleges of Georgia and Tennessee -- and recipient of Poland's highest honors for his part in their civil war. Uncle John Bones was prominent in establishing the first railroads. Her cousins included Wade Hampton; James Hammond [Governor of South Carolina]; and Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar who married A. B. Longstreet's daughter Virginia, then moved to Mississippi to became a U.S. Senator and U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Poet-journalist Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, as did her father Gilbert, moved on to Texas where he became the second President of the Republic. Charles Colcock Jones, Jr., anthropologist and Georgia historian, was her attorney --and married her niece Eva Berrien Eve. These and many others influenced the character of Emma Eve Longstreet who married Josiah Sibley on August 4th, 1860, the eve of the Civil War. Josiah was a staunch Southern partisan who actively and financially supported the South's cause with his factories, influence and five sons who fought for the Confederacy. He was also an early abolitionist who freed his slaves, educated and trained them for trades, and financed the start of their own businesses. For those who wanted to return to Africa, he underwrote the trip and their commercial establishment in Liberia. Josiah believed that in an armed conflict the South would likely be overwhelmed by the North's greater industrial strength and population. Therefore, at the outbreak of hostilities he shipped 1200 bales of cotton to his agents in England to warehouse, and await his instructions. The first three children of Josiah and Emma Sibley were born during the war. John Adams Sibley was born in 1861, James Longstreet Sibley in 1863 and Mary Bones Sibley in 1865. During those same four years Josiah buried two of his older children, including Henry Josiah who died during the siege and evacuation of Atlanta. Josiah's premonitions for the war's outcome were correct. The South was devastated. Georgia's financial, mercantile and industrial base now destroyed, he sent word to England to sell the cotton for gold. He accurately assumed that the cotton-starved English mills would pay a premium. With the gold, he was able to purchase U.S. currency to refinance his banks and exchange his customers' worthless Confederate notes for U.S. bills on a first-come basis. Within 24 hours his money had been given away, but the infusion of capital refinanced many individuals and enterprises for the rebuilding. In 1865, Augusta was in dire need of financial relief. With the authority of the city Council, and the credit of his reputation in the North, Josiah was able to borrow $100,000 for Augusta, the equivalent of $1,000,000 today. He was one of the few people in Augusta who could, and did, sell his check at par in New York, for sums as high as $100,000 in 1865-66. It was during the darkest days of Reconstruction that the last child, Josephine Sibley, was born on February 23, 1867. Even though the chaos of Reconstruction was all about them, the family was fortunate to still possess their homes and a substantial amount of the furnishings. Among those were 18th & 19th century portraits, miniatures, needlework scenes, engravings, architectural scenes and Hudson River school landscape paintings -- enough to attract the attention of a future artist. Jo was born in the Sibley family home on Bay Street. An entire city block of downtown Augusta was devoted to the residence, stables and gardens. It was a substantial brick house with broad piazzas over-looking the Savannah River. When she was 76, she described herself as still in awe of the drawing rooms especially the gold front parlor with it's rosewood furniture and green brocade, "the chandelier, heavy window cornices and tall mirror reaching from floor to ceiling--the golden cupid at the top just could escape being decapitated". They also had her grandfather's nearby country retreat, The Cottage, which her mother and aunt Hannah owned jointly, as well as her parent's Greek Revival summer home, Cottage Hill, at the foot of Kennesaw Mountain near Marietta. Her parent's greatest gifts to Jo Sibley were more than material objects. From her father she inherited directness, brevity, integrity and financial prudence. From her mother, a sense of appropriateness, an appreciation of literature and a sensitivity to natural beauty. From both she received a strong love of God and Christian principles. As a child, Josephine Sibley could best be described as a "Tom-boy". She was more than a passable athlete, and later she became a master at tennis. She was a superb swimmer, an equestrienne, and she could beat any boy's best time climbing any tree. Until age twelve.Four noteworthy things happened in 1879. First, she turned twelve. Second, she became aware of boys as boys. Third, she began penning her father's business correspondence as he dictated it. Fourth, the family toured Europe. They were gone from Augusta for almost six months. It is in her daily journals of that excursion that the real beginnings of the future artist become most apparent. It is here that is found the first documented awareness of art, color, material, texture and detail. The party of eight traveled through Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and France. They did the usual tourist things taking in parks, theatres, cathedrals and palaces. They visited with friends in each country, and kept bumping into family and friends from home. Jo dutifully kept the record of it all and commented on what she had seen. She also sketched some of her observations. She recorded the frescoed walls of their Dublin hotel, the colored marbles at Trinity College and the illuminations in the Book of Kells. Edinburgh's picture gallery with religious paintings and painted mummies. Colored fabrics at Holyrood, crown jewels and carved ivories. A tortoise shell cabinet at Walter Scott's Abbottsford. Tapestries at Haddon Hall and "gloomy" Westminster Abbey. Paintings by Raphael and Titian's Holy Family; the religious paintings at Dore's picture gallery; and the colored light of St. George's chapel as it played across the carved effigy of Queen Charlotte. She wrote about the Rubens' in Antwerp's picture gallery, the stained glass of Cologne Cathedral, and a mother-of-pearl church door in Bremen. German wheelbarrows were different from America's, so she sketched one as she also did the parquet flooring of the Emperor's palace in Berlin --where she observed that there were no carpets on the floor, unlike their home. Then at the King's palace in Dresden she commented about the paintings, sculpture, a mosaic table, "...lots of carved amber set with precious stones ... a crucifix of coral...set in topaz, garnets and emerald". In the picture gallery she saw "one of the most celebrated pictures in the world, the Madonna...by Raphael" and "an immense aquamarine, it is a light greenish stone". In Geneva the ladies visited a number of places including Adolph Rothchild's, while Josiah and the boys took their own week-long side trip to Venice from which they returned with pictures. Then, at last, on to Paris. They were off to the Tuilleries Gardens and it's Palace recently burned during the Commune uprising; the Madelaine; Notre Dame; and the Hotel des Invalides -- where she described Napoleon's tomb with it's marbles, bronzes and the encircling angels. Then, "We have been to the Louvre and it is useless to try to describe it." That must have been an eye-opening experience for the 12-year-old. After that she was not overly impressed with what she saw, excepting one night at the theatre where there was at one time some 50 horses on stage. They went to Versailles about which she had no comment, except for the Gallery which held "...a magnificent picture of the Coronation of Josephine [Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825], and the Siege of Yorktown"[Louis Ch. Aug. Couder, 1789-1873; pupil of David]. As for the Trianon and Petite Trianon, they were dismissed as "not very imposing, for it was only one story high" regarding the former, and "not very much to say about this place. Saw a picture of Louis 17." for the latter. Back in Paris they shopped and toured, visiting the Palais Royal and the Panorama of Paris. While she thought the city beautiful, she was not overwhelmed by the mercantile establishments: "...there is not a single store in Paris that I have seen that is as imposing as A. T. Stewart's in New York"! The 12-year-old's 1879 journals make no mention of the french impressionists whose work she later admired, particularly Cezanne, Degas, Manet and Monet. Yet, Paris was then rife with controversy regarding the "New Painting" and the Refuses, an exhibition of their work having closed just before the family arrived. In a letter to her son, B. King Couper (Jr.), some 70 years later she wrote: "I think my love for art began to bud about this time. Paris had wonderful drawing books for sale and it must have been upon my return that a teacher was found to instruct me." The 1879 trip was clearly a break-through, not only for her but for her father. Her field journal was more carefully copied, including the sketches, and bound for official presentation to Josiah. If he had not recognized her serious pre-occupation with art before, he did now. She let it be known that she wanted art lessons. An instructor was engaged, with less than an enthusiastic response by her, for her description of the ordeal sounds much like china painting: "The said teacher painted our Southern flowers well, upon black varnished panels that I hated, but now with awful modernistic paintings no doubt I could forgive the panels. I now began to live. I am sure I was born with a tennis racquet in one hand and a paint brush in the other. Old sketch books preserve members of the family as I early sought drawing from nature rather than copying pictures." Apparently there was a far better experience with the next instructor for, of him she wrote: "When I was about eighteen I had a real art teacher - a friend of [John Singer] Sargent's and fresh from Paris. If I needed an incentive to work I had it in a charming instructor. He also introduced me to tennis. Forming a group of players we met twice a week at his attractive home and afterwards there were the drives home by moonlight. Now I had painting, tennis and horseback riding." Unfortunately, we do not yet know the identity of Sargent's "friend". Her sketch books for the period show a dramatic improvement which suggests the "real art teacher"'s influence. Her father apparently began to take her determination more seriously, for he had a studio house built for her on the grounds of the Augusta home and he tore open the roof of Cottage Hill, the summer house, for an attic studio. Her time spent there were some of the most joyful of her early life. About 1886 she enrolled in a Charleston, S. C., art school with two close friends, Sarah Smythe and sculptor Susan Mary Buttolph. Her appetite only whetted, she shortly announced a desire for the Art Students' League in New York, and instruction by American master artists. At that suggestion, her father put his foot down. No daughter of his was going to live in a walk-up cold-water garret in New York! Josiah Sibley passed away on December 7th, 1888. He had already dispensed substantial properties on each of his fifteen children to establish them for the future. When he died he was still possessed of some 80,000 acres, commercial real estate in several states and stocks to be distributed among his heirs. Jo was off like a shot to New York and the Art Student's League. But not without mixed feelings, for it was about this time that she first met Butler King Couper at a summer gathering in Marietta. "King"'s younger brother Thomas Butler Couper was a riding companion of John Sibley, Jo's older brother. Introductions were made, and back at home that evening, Jo observed that she had just met "the only man I could ever marry". King's grandfather was Thomas Butler King, late of the U.S. Congress and the Confederate Ambassador to England, whose wife, Anna Matilda Page, was the mistress of Retreat Planation on St. Simon's Island, Georgia. Their daughter Hannah married William Audley Couper, son of John Couper, of Cannon's Point, St. Simon's Island, and moved to Marietta where their children were born. Butler King Couper [1851-1913] managed a knitting mill in Marietta. Jo's beloved sister Mary married Albert Sidney Johnston Gardner, of Augusta, and was given the Marietta summer house Cottage Hill as a wedding present, for their permanent residence. Jo had every good reason for returning to Marietta from New York and the Art Student's League. Yet, the experience of the Art Students League resulted in her determination to return to Europe and retrace the earlier trip, this time experiencing the art with a better trained eye. In the summer of 1890 Jo sailed out of New York, accompanied only by her mother, for four full months of museums and art immersion. Her mother kept up a running correspondence with children and friends at home, while Jo was more likely to resort to sketching on little cards to record such sites and scenes (with commentary) as she thought would amuse those at home. Fortunately, a number of these cards still exist. The itinerary of the 1890 trip was almost a duplicate of the 1879 tour, but with the addition of Vienna, Bavaria and North Italy. The letters and cards sent home mention the same painters --Rubens, Titian and Raphael -- but now add Correggio and Rembrandt, about whom her mother reported Jo "was transported". There was also a perfectly acceptable sketch of the Infanta in Velazquez's Las Meninas. From this trip to the Louvre she brought back more than memories of the antique and contemporary masters, for new technical processes made available engravings and reproductions, such as Jean Francois Millet's The Gleaners [1857], which found a home in her studio. While the ship carrying Jo and her mother was still at sea, but approaching New York, Butler King Couper stepped up on deck. With a case of champagne he had bribed the harbor pilot to take him out to the ship before it docked. They were married on May 27th, 1891. The Couper's settled in Marietta, where King added a wing onto his parent's large home for Jo's artist's studio. Their first child, Constance Maxwell Couper was born at Marietta in 1897. She, along with sister Mary Gardner's children -- Emma, Charles, Jordan and Lois -- all made excellent subjects. Sketches, studies, portraits, still lifes and landscapes poured out of the studio, into many Georgia homes. Unfortunately, most of them were not signed at the time. She began to define her own approach to art, as opposed to the studio art of the educational process at the League. Still inspired by the best of the master's, she could, and did, draw studies of the children that illustrate her superb draftsmanship. But what is most apparent is her early interest in light, its source, and its effects. Studies would come first in charcoal, ink or any other material readily at hand. Then, the color rendition in oil or pastel. Light poured on the subject, sometimes frontally, sometimes oblique, and frequently from the rear to make the subject visually separate from the canvas. The portrait of her sister-in-law "Mattie", (Mrs. James L. Sibley), is lit totally from the left rear with Mattie in silhouette, floating on an iridescent plane of lavender-pink light. The portrait of her young nephew, Frank Sibley, could have flowed from Sargent's lush brush strokes. The boy is lit strongly from the left front against a dark ground, so that his face becomes almost three-dimensional. Jo always considered herself a "color" artist, and she sought out the company of likeminded artists, frequently painting with William Merritt Chase at Old Lyme, Connecticut. One of her close friends was the extraordinary Mathilde de Cordoba, also a Chase student, with whom she studied at the League, and who lived with the Couper's for a period. Mathilde also executed studies of some of the same subjects, either executing engravings or rendering them in pastels -- a medium at which Jo excelled. Fortunately, Jo's family was extensive and supplied many sitters. She did not care particularly for palette-knife paintings, but she had no aversion to building up layers on an otherwise smooth, flat, sheet of paint in order to heighten an effect. She began to develop illusions of depth by casting light into an object. In one still-life of a glass bowl on a table, the first impression is only that of a bowl with light reflections, until, suddenly, the realization comes that we are looking into her studio which is within the bowl. Luminosity, color, atmosphere and light cast in different planes for three-dimensionality, all began to be a part of her progression toward an individual style. About 1900 King took a new position in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and the family moved. He soon started his own firm. In 1905 they built their own custom-designed home at 302 S. Pine Street in Spartanburg, in which her studio was an integral part of the house, not an addition. Jo thought that some of her best work was executed in Spartanburg. Certainly her brush-strokes became more free, colors more vivid and textures more fluid. This was a remarkably fulfilling time in her life, for she truly did have everything: a loving husband, daughter, their own home, her studio, a tennis court in the gardens, and, then, she gave birth to a son, Butler King Couper, Jr. She continued under Chase's influence but added Elliott Daingerfield to her list of art friends, mentors and colleagues. Along with some members of the Ash-Can School. Her work increased with pronounced success, and, with Margaret Law, she founded the Spartanburg Arts and Crafts Club. In 1907 Jo and Margaret brought to Spartanburg a national and regional art exhibit. Jo brought Robert Henri, accompanied by his internationally famous painting "Girl with the Red Hair". It, along with some of her works, are now in the Spartanburg Arts Center. Art historian Frank Coleman recalls asking Jo how Henri's painting was purchased for Spartanburg. "Young man, I sold tickets for 10, 15 and 25 cents on the streets." That determination was an essential element of her character. She would need it now more than ever, for the cotton market collapsed and King's professional life was endangered. The firm survived, but the strain may well have caused the heart-attack that killed him on the night of October 20th, 1913, while comforting his ill son. Mother and children continued on in the Spartanburg house until her son's graduation from high school. Her art filled most of the time not devoted to the children, her church and charitable works, including construction of missions in Uganda -- similar to her mother's contributions during the 1880's in China. She was associated with numerous arts related organizations including, among many others, the Southern States Art League, National Arts Club (NY), and the Boston Arts Club. Her works were frequently shown along the Eastern seaboard, and requests came from museums for inclusion in their collections. Success brought additional commissions and, excepting her expenses for art supplies, every penny was given to churches, missions and charity. Her interest in people led to an uncanny ability to capture mood and character, rather than a photographic likeness in oil. Her daughter Constance left in 1922 for missionary work in Korea. The house was sold prior to her son's graduation from high school in 1924, after which he left for Davidson. Jo Couper moved to a mountaintop aerie in Montreat, North Carolina, from which she ventured annually to join the art colony at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the tutelage of Hugh Breckenridge. Experimenting with light, color and atmosphere, she began to achieve a new mastery of color. Suddenly she could lay two different colors side-by-each and a third color was perceived. The juxtaposition of two or more colors could also render the impression of movement, in addition to iridescent and luminous effects. Colors began to float on the canvas; points of color derived from refracted light, which, when re-combined by the eye, suggest movement and distinctly different chroma. Many of the Gloucester scenes exemplify this new-found free use of color. The stained glass cathedral windows of antiquity are, when looking directly at the windows, multiple points of rich color, but, if one looks down at the floor or a book, the light is white. Some of her paintings appear to have white houses in landscape. Closer examination shows little or no white in use on the canvas, but rather, many colors and hues. The Gloucester painting of The Boy in the Boat makes use of color juxtaposition and light poured behind the picture plane, to give a sensation of rocking, flowing, three-dimensionality. She was overjoyed at this new freedom. Once mastered, it was time to experiment more. King was now at MIT, Constance in Korea, and she could pursue new inspiration. She paused for a short time with the sculptor Demetrius where she concentrated on the flowing lines of studies in mass, and then left for Paris and Andre L'hote, one of the undisputed masters of Cubism and the Art Deco period. First, however, she spent the summer of 1929 in Brittany, France, where she followed her own inclinations and judgment about color composition. One of the series she produced that summer, Market Woman, was accepted the following year at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In the Fall of 1929, Constance crossed China and caught the Trans-Siberian Railway for Europe to visit her mother. King circled the globe via Japan, China, India and the Southern route to meet them in Paris for Thanksgiving. It had been seven years since all three had been together. Under L'hote's influence through 1930, Jo Couper geometrically disintegrated the representational figure and then reconstructed it as planes of color. From there she progressed to swirling, boldly outlined fields of color. This bold new direction is masterfully presented in her self portrait, and is a pre-cursor to the strong, yet fluid, full-color scenes she would create for the rest of her life. She returned to the United States for five one-person shows in New York which occupied her for two years. She was presented at the Arts Center (1930); the English Bookshop and The Fifteen Gallery (1931); The Milch Gallery and the National Arts Center (1932). One painting in particular received much popular attention: "Where Now?". It captured the emotions of the Depression -- a dazed and exhausted man seated with all that remained of his life in a single bag on his lap. Jo sold the Montreat studio in 1934 and moved to Tryon, N. C., where she spent the remainder of her years. She brought paintings and painters from New York to be exhibited at her Rock House studio. From here she traveled to Charleston and California to execute a series of landscape and urban-life color paintings. Always in love with the Blue Ridge mountains of the Carolinas, she produced untold numbers of canvases depicting the landscape of the region, as well as the many individualists that lived there. Canvases were frequently unfinished, for once the character and mood had been captured on this pure white field, no more was required. She also executed a series known as Georgia Scenes, which brought her back to the land and people where she began. Full of power, stark in their simplicity and rich with color, they captured the character of the Georgia she knew. One, in particular, has a passion and violence that caught the moment, not so much of a studied object, but of what she was experiencing. At the beginning of World War II, the Federal government confiscated Cottage Hill and the surrounding acreage for construction of Dobbins Air Force Base and a Lockheed bomber plant. Jo's now elderly sister Mary and her two daughters were given thirty days to arrange their affairs and vacate. Jo rushed to help. Within three weeks a little cottage was found, possessions given away and the remains of a century of one family's occupancy destroyed. They witnessed the magnificent groves of trees felled, and in their last week the bull-dozers cut through the gardens to lay railroad tracks for the new base within a hundred feet of the house portico. This much loved home was no longer their's. The first night they found refuge at a hotel in Jasper, Georgia. Jo was 74. She glanced out the window of her room to see the setting sun's hot light streak across the red clay in a railroad cut opposite. An old hump-backed wooden bridge arched over the cut, silhouetted against this fiery scene. All the world seemed out of kilter; the telephone poles, bridge supports and surrounding deteriorated buildings listed at different impossible angles as if her beloved Georgia soil had been suddenly rent open to expose the very depths of hell. Here, for a fleeting moment, was captured the fury which she felt for the injustice and the desecration of beautiful Cottage Hill. The paint she laid on canvas that night brought together all of the elements of her art: luminism, color, light, mood and character. Constance and her husband, John Haney, settled near her in Tryon in order to assist as much as the determined and independent octogenarian would allow. "She was the epitome of the Southern lady, and today old timers will recall her erect figure, great dignity, flashing azure blue eyes, complete with white gloves and gold-headed walking cane. `Stand straight,' she would frequently admonish the young folk around her, emphasized with a brisk tap of her walking cane." [Frank Coleman, 1988] Painting to the very last at her studio, Jo Couper fell in the evening of October 22, 1957. Her hip broken, she was taken to the Greenville, S.C., hospital. She passed away on October 25th, at age 90. On the 27th, at 2 p.m., she was interred beside Butler King Couper in her family's private burying ground, a brick walled compound in a five acre grove of towering Georgia pines outside of Augusta. Josephine Sibley Couper was laid to rest among the scores of her loved ones who had passed to her the character, dignity and determination to create her own world of art. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Dedicated with grateful appreciation to those who protected and preserved J. S. Couper's legacy: her son, Butler King Couper, Jr.; son-in-law, John W. Haney; and late daughter, Constance Maxwell Couper Haney. J. L. Sibley Jennings, Jr. AIA |