Edwin Harleston

Edwin Harleston (March 14, 1882 – May 5, 1931) was an African-American painter associated with the Charleston Renaissance. He was also the first president of the Charleston, South Carolina, chapter of the NAACP.

Edwin Augustus "Teddy" Harleston was born in Charleston, on March 14, 1882. He was one of eight children of Louisa Moultrie Harleston and Edwin Galliard Harleston, a prosperous former coastal schooner captain who owned the Harleston Funeral Home. His mother traced her lineage through several generations of free people of color, while his father was descended from a white planter and one of his slaves.

Harleston won a scholarship to study at the local Avery Normal Institute, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1900. He went on to Atlanta University, where studied chemistry and sociology and took courses with W. E. B. Du Bois, who became a lifelong friend. After graduating in 1904, Harleston stayed on for a year as a teaching assistant in both sociology and chemistry while planning the next step in his education. Although he was admitted to Harvard University, he decided instead to attend the Boston Museum of Fine Art's school. There he studied under the painters William McGregor Paxton and Frank Weston Benson from 1905 to 1913.

Harleston returned to South Carolina to help his father run the funeral home, continuing to do so until 1931, the year both he and his father died. He became active in local civil rights groups and in 1917 rose to be president of Charleston's newly formed branch of the NAACP. One campaign he led succeeded in getting the local public school system to hire black teachers.

Harleston painted in a realist style that was influenced by both his Boston training and his wife's work. He mostly painted portraits, often on commission, and his sitters included notables such as Grace Towns, who later became the first African-American woman elected to the Georgia General Assembly; philanthropist Pierre S. du Pont; and Edward Twitchell Ware, a former president of Atlanta University. He also painted genre scenes of the daily life of Charleston's African-American citizens—especially its rising middle class—as well as some landscapes of South Carolina Lowcountry. Out of step with the rising modernism of the 1920s, he saw himself as continuing in the tradition of Henry Ossawa Tanner by portraying black people and their lives realistically instead of as caricatures or stereotypes. Harleston was described by W. E. B. Du Bois as the "leading portrait painter of the race" even though his responsibility for helping to run the funeral home meant he could never devote himself to being a painter full-time.

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