The Southern Art Spirit
by Zan Schuweiler Daab

Although the artist was a native of Augusta, Georgia, it is fitting that the Spartanburg County Museum of Art exhibit the paintings of Josephine Sibley Couper, formally known as Mrs. B. King Couper or J.S. Couper in the art world. She lived in Spartanburg from 1900-1918, and she remains important to the community not only for her colorful paintings of people and landscapes, but also as the co-founder of the Arts and Crafts Club in Spartanburg in 1907 with her good friend and fellow artist Margaret Law. The Arts and Crafts Club received donations of paintings and raised money to purchase some of the most significant artworks in the current collection of the Spartanburg County Museum of Art, including The Girl with Red Hair (fig.18) by Robert Henri.

They grew up in different states, yet in many ways the lives of Josephine Sibley Couper and Margaret Law parallel each other. Their families were related through friendship and marriage for over 250 years.2 Both of their families were of the genteel Southern aristocracy where education, travel, and culture were integral to their lives. Josephine’s niece Lillian Pearl Shivers Sibley, who attended Converse College in Spartanburg in 1892, married Margaret Law’s brother John Adger Law. As relatives and artists, naturally Josephine and Margaret developed a friendship. Typical of serious art students in 19th century America, they both traveled to New York to study. Couper studied at the Art Students League in 1888, while Law was there in the late 1890’s. Law earned her undergraduate degree in art at Converse College before leaving Spartanburg for New York City, while Couper studied art for two years in Charleston, South Carolina before going to New York.

It was during her first trip to Europe when she was twelve that Couper first decided to pursue a career as an artist. After studying at the Art Students League for a couple of years, she was determined to make another trip. In 1890 she left with her mother for a whirlwind tour that included the British Isles, France, Germany and Italy. The Old Masters—Rubens, Titian, Raphael and Rembrandt— impressed her the most, with the addition of the realist Francois Millet and his painting The Gleaners. She makes no reference to the new modern art of Impressionism or Post-Impressionism in her correspondence. Like most Americans who were uneducated about modern art until the Armory Show of 1913, she found it distasteful. Couper’s early work demonstrates the technical skills in drawing along with the smooth finish and dark palette of the traditional academy.

Emma Josephine Sibley (she later dropped her first name), the daughter of Josiah Sibley and Emma Eve Longstreet, married Butler King Couper of St. Simon’s Georgia in 1891 and settled in Marietta, Georgia where he managed a knitting mill. They moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina with their daughter Constance in 1900 where he started a textile firm. They built a fine home at 276 S. Pine Street 3 where Josephine had a studio in the upstairs north room. It later became the studio of Spartanburg native and well-known portrait artist Grace DuPré after she returned from New York. Josephine Couper considered her years in Spartanburg to be some of her most productive and fulfilling (according to her great nephew J.L. Sibley Jennings, Jr.). Her family responsibilities increased with the birth of a son, Butler King Couper, Jr. When she was free from family duties and volunteer activities, she focused on her art--primarily portraiture at this time. She became well known along the Southeast for her portraits which capture the sitter with a penetrating likeness and casual pose. She was very involved in charity work and used the money from the sale of her art to give to churches and charities. One of the charities she was most interested in was the construction of missions in Uganda, similar to her mother’s missions in China. After her husband’s death in 1913, Josephine continued to live in Spartanburg until 1918 when she moved to Montreat, North Carolina.

For the people of Spartanburg, Couper’s legacy lies in the co-founding of the Arts and Crafts Club, which led to what is now the Spartanburg County Museum of Art. The first exhibit in April 1907, organized by Couper and Law, featured more than one hundred paintings. The artists included Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase. Margaret Law had attended Chase’s school, The New York School of Art where Chase and Robert Henri were her teachers. Chase also taught Couper at his summer school in Lyme, Connecticut at the end of the 1800s. Although Chase influenced Law in her plein air landscapes and expressive use of color, Couper remained more influenced by the academy and rejected the Impressionist style of Chase until the 1920’s. Couper’s work also shows a lack of interest in the Social Realist style of Henri. Henri was known for his depictions of everyday life, and his subjects typically were of the urban lower class. Law adhered to his art philosophy by depicting the everyday world of working people; her subjects were often of the cotton pickers or orchard workers, or people in the marketplace. Such subjects held no interest for Couper, who remained staunchly entrenched in her upper-class society. An anecdote captures her personality and wit, as told by Jim Jackson who modeled for her as a boy in Tryon, North Carolina. He recalls telling her that she reminded him of the Queen Mother of England, and she retorted, “And what makes you think I’m not?”4 One can observe her stately attitude, with her proud, erect carriage, in her self-portraits.

In addition, the Charleston artist and friend of Margaret Law’s, Anna Heyward Taylor, exhibited her work in the Arts and Crafts Club show. J.S. Couper, whose work had been exhibited in Philadelphia, included her paintings in the show, as did Margaret Law who brought the artworks she had exhibited at the New York Pen and Brush Club. Many other artists whose names are forgotten were also shown. The exhibit was held above the Thom McKann Shoe Store on the corner of South Church Street and Main Street. A vote by the viewers favored Henri’s painting The Girl with Red Hair (fig.18) as best in show, and Couper and Law raised the funds to purchase it by selling coupons that ranged from five cents to five dollars. They only raised four-hundred dollars, but thanks to the generosity of the Trakas family, recent immigrants from Greece, the painting was purchased for five-hundred dollars.

Another artist with ties to Law and Couper was the North Carolina artist Elliott Daingerfield, who remains one of the most significant American painters of the late 19th century, and one of the first Southern artists to gain a national reputation. Daingerfield (1859-1932) was born in West Virginia but had lived in North Carolina since infancy. He had made the typical pilgrimage to New York in 1880 to study, and he developed a successful career in New York. He then taught at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women from 1895-1915, where a number of artists from the South studied. After her graduation from Converse College in 1895, Margaret Law attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia before going to New York, and may have met Daingerfield in the artist’s circles of Philadelphia during this time. Daingerfield resided in his retreat in Blowing Rock, North Carolina for increasing periods of time beginning in 1886 before settling there permanently after World War I. He had gained a reputation for his symbolist-style paintings—largely landscapes. His style was dark, with moody shadows, evocative and mysterious. Couper may have made his acquaintance through Margaret Law and probably also heard of his reputation in New York. While she was living in Spartanburg, Couper took lessons from him at his studio in Blowing Rock. It remains unclear what Couper gained from her lessons with Daingerfield. Her art produced while in Spartanburg remained primarily portraits of her family and friends in a traditional style.

After Couper moved to Montreat, North Carolina, she joined the Rocky Neck Artist’s Colony every summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts to study with Hugh Breckenridge. Breckenridge was an American Impressionist who had the reputation of being the best Impressionist artist in this country in the first decade of the 1900’s. 5 Whether it was due to her new freedom now that both her children were grown and she was on her own in her mountain retreat, or Breckenridge’s teaching, Couper’s style changed. She abandoned the tight brushwork and dark palette she generally favored; her palette became bright and her brushwork loose and painterly. One can see this in the painting of her home Alta Vista (fig.13) which was reproduced on the October 31, 1931 cover of Literary Digest. Her many paintings of Gloucester scenes represent her new style, including the Spartanburg County Museum of Art’s painting Mending the Nets, 1925. (fig.14) These paintings suddenly open up to light and color as never before. Her subject matter also expanded to include more landscapes as well as portraits. One has the sense that the artist was able to loosen her bodice and breathe freely for the first time. The Victorian era was over.

In the fall of 1929-1930, Couper went to Brittany and then Paris, France. In Paris she studied with André Lhote, the Cubist artist who espoused modern art philosophy. Margaret Law had studied with him in 1923 and probably influenced Couper to take his classes. Couper’s surviving notes from this class indicate that she was a serious student of modernism with its emphasis on self-expression rather than naturalism in art. For a short while she experimented with the angular, monochromatic style of Analytic Cubism, before returning to her Impressionistic style. Although she never seriously adopted cubism, her work indicates that the class enhanced the freedom of expression she had begun exploring while working with Breckenridge. Some of her paintings after 1930 take more liberties with exaggerated color and line to express emotion, as seen , for example, in the painting of Mary Lois Gardner (not pictured), or the painting of the destruction of Cottage Hill. (fig. 2)

Couper moved to Tryon, North Carolina in 1934 where she exhibited her work along with the work of artists from New York and elsewhere at her home the “Rock House.” In the 1940’s Margaret Law’s life again corresponded with Couper’s when she moved to Lake Summit outside of neighboring Saluda, North Carolina. In Tryon, Couper was famous for her erect carriage, flashing blue eyes, 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.” 6

Even to the end of her days, Couper remained an energizing force to promote art in the region. Just as she had sparked community support for the arts while she was in Spartanburg, her gallery/studio in Tryon introduced the area to art outside the region, and added vitality to the culture of the area. The painting Girl with Red Hair, which she and Margaret Law brought to Spartanburg, remains the most significant work in the Spartanburg County Museum of Art’s collection. The museum is fortunate to have several paintings by Couper. Her paintings are also in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon Georgia, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, the Columbia Museum of Art (S.C.) as well as other collections. Always the Victorian Southern lady, one can only imagine what she would think of the changes in art and the South since her death in 1957. 7

1 Some sources have indicated that she lived in Spartanburg until as late as 1924, but according to the City Directory she moved after 1918.

2 J.L. Sibley Jennings, Jr., correspondence 08.05.02.

3 Other sources have given the address as 302 S. Pine. The 1918 City Directory lists her address as 276 Pine Street.

4 Jim Jackson, telephone interview with the author, 06.19.02.

5 William Gerdts, American Impressionism (New York: Abbeville Publishers, 1892) 233.

6 Frank Coleman, “Around the Corner,” The Daniel Morgan Register (5.26.88) 5.

7 I would like to thank the great nephew of J.S. Couper, Mr. J.L. Sibley Jennings, Jr., and Mr. Michael J. McCue, author of Tryon Artists: 1892-1942.