(click anywhere on the image to zoom-in)
This painting shows an archetypical Charleston house from the mid-eighteenth century. This type of house is a separate, multi-storey dwelling one room wide and three rooms across including a central entrance and stair hall. Also, typically, but not necessarily, it has its narrow end to the street, a piazza along one of its longer sides, and back wall chimneys. This was a creative response to the increasing scarcity of space in the city and was designed to mitigate the unpleasantness of hot, humid summers. With its narrow directly on the street, the rectangular house with two rooms on each storey grew tall to raise the main entertaining room to the level of the prevailing breeze which passed through a side piazza. As a free-standing house communicating more with a side garden than with the street, the single house offered a masterful but still vernacular solution to the residential problems of achieving comfort, privacy and propriety.
Jonathan used 'artistic license' to remove surrounding buildings in order to show the house in its entirety.
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| Church Street | |||
| Oil on Canvas | |||
| Charleston, South Carolina, USA |
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| Commissioned by: | |||
| Kathleen Rivers |
