Biography from Morris & Whiteside Galleries:
| Carew Rice (1899-1971) was born at on a plantation near Bostic Pond about three and a half miles south of Allendale, South Carolina. He was educated at the University of Chattanooga where he took an art course as an elective. His professor commented that most people identify their friends by profiles, not the details of their hair color, height or complexion. Rice was so taken with the comment that he went into a dime store in downtown Chattanooga and bought a pair of scissors on a whim for a quarter. He went back to his boardinghouse that evening and began cutting his way into Southern history.
Rice was also a folk-singer and story-teller well known throughout South Carolina and his intricate compositions of Lowcountry landscapes and figurative silhouettes were eagerly sought by Charleston society and collectors throughout the world. There was a time when no Lowcountry home was complete without framed silhouette portraits of children done by Carew Rice.
With a trademark beret, that he picked up in Paris, and his pencil mustache, Carew Rice was a celebrated figure at festivals, state fairs, church bazaars and sidewalk art shows. The poet Carl Sandburg once hailed Carew Rice as “America’s greatest Silhouettist” and certainly Rice’s bold style and depictions of the Deep South rank him among the masters of the medium.
Carew Rice died at Brick House plantation, near Wiggins, South Carolina in the home his father, James Henry Rice, Jr. had built in 1918.
Silhouette cutting takes its name from Eteinne De Silhouette, former French Minister of finance during the mid-eighteenth century. An ardent practitioner of the art form, Etienne’s unfair taxation ultimately led to the French Revolution when the French people frequently dressed in black and described themselves “a la Silhouette, just shadows”.
Submitted by Jack Morris, Morris& Whiteside Galleries
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