Charles Fraser was an American artist, miniature painter. He is considered as one of the foremost painters of miniatures of the early 19th century.
Background
Charles Fraser was born on August 20, 1782 in Charleston, Charleston County, and was the fourteenth and youngest child of Alexander and Mary (Grimke) Fraser, grew to manhood surrounded by relatives and friends who had taken part in the Revolution.
Education
Fraser's education began at a classical school and was continued at the College of Charleston, but at an early age he showed an artistic bent which was intensified by his association with Sully, Malbone, and Washington Allston.
With these young men, who like himself were destined to stand high among early American artists, he enjoyed a pleasant friendship.
Career
Educated by his guardians for the legal profession, he was admitted to the bar in 1807 and continued to practice law until 1818, by which date he had accumulated a competency. This enabled him to pursue professionally the art which had always attracted his taste and ambition, and to the study of which he had given his hours of leisure.
When Fraser abandoned the law for art he retained many of his former interests. He was often called upon to deliver public addresses, and for many years attended the weekly meetings of the Conversation Club, where he met such leaders of thought as Stephen Elliott, Agassiz, Dickson, Bachman, Gilman, Holbrook, and Ravenel.
Among the numerous essays which he read at these meetings were his “Reminiscences of Charleston, ” an authentic picture of the com munity, published in 1854. He was a member of the board of trustees of the College of Charleston as early as 1817, and served in that capacity and as treasurer for nearly forty years.
A few reasonably creditable verses survive to justify William D. Porter’s description of him as “a man of exquisite taste and refinement, artist, scholar, and poet” ( Y ear Book of the City of Charleston, 1882, p. 283). It was to his miniatures, however, which he painted in large numbers, and with conspicuous success, that Fraser owed his general recognition.
There are listed in the catalogue of works exhibited in 1857 some 313 miniatures and 139 oil-paintings, which probably represented only a fraction of his work.
Most of the prominent Carolinians of his day sat to him, and he was chosen by the city of Charleston to paint a miniature of Lafayette at the time of his visit there in 1825.
Views
Having already developed from his education a strong literary taste, his practise at the bar strengthened his intellectual power and gave him great breadth of outlook. It brought him into contact, too, with a group of distinguished lawyers who maintained “that high character for courtesy, learning, and liberality imparted to the Charleston Bar by eminent men who had studied their profession at the Inns of Court in London. ”
Membership
Fraser was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1834.
Personality
Fraser was characterized as deft, subtle, uncompromising, and of a withal sympathetic personality.