David A. Windham

Sam Doyle

I am always checking the art galleries in downtown Charleston and as the city becomes more saturated with newbies, I am reminded of how much culture is already here in the Lowcountry of SC. Here’s some stuff I know about because I’ve been to the places, read the books, seen the paintings, and visited the artists.

The subjects of Sam Doyle’s₁ paintings are his community, the Island of St. Helena. As a child in the early 1900’s, Sam Doyle saw the migration first hand. He himself was offered an opportunity, early on, to leave his island for New York City by a sister of one of his teachers at the Penn School₃. His refusal to migrate to New York for formal art training was a direct function of his family’s impoverished condition

Local Heroes: Paintings and Sculpture by Sam Doyle – High Museum of Art, Atlanta₃ – 70 portraits with subjects ranging from Miss Luckie Food Stamp and Onk Sam to Martin Luther King and Ray Charles, done in house paint on old roofing tin by Sam Doyle (1906-1985), who lived his entire life near the small community of Frogmore on St. Helena Island, S. C. The show originated at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum; following its appearance in Fort Worth, it travels to the Muse des Arts Dcoratif, Paris, and the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

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High Sherrif of the Lowcountry is a book written by Sheriff J. E. McTeer. (1903-1979): McTeer began his 37-year term as Beaufort County Sheriff in 1926, the nation’s youngest sheriff at age 22. He was a self-proclaimed witch doctor whose best-known nemesis during his law enforcement career was “root doctor” Doctor Buzzard (Stepheney Robinson), who eventually admitted that McTeer’s voodoo powers were greater than his own. The Sheriff’s books — High Sheriff of the Lowcountry; 50 Years as a Lowcountry Witch Doctor; Beaufort, Now and Then; and Adventure in the Woods and Waters of the Lowcountry — reflect the words inscribed on the bridge that now bears his name: “legendary lawman, author, spellbinder and raconteur.”

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1. Sam Doyle – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Doyle
2. Penn Center – https://www.penncenter.com
3. Local Heroes: Paintings and Sculpture by Sam Doyle – High Museum of Art, Atlanta – https://www.tfaoi.org/aa/2aa/2aa16.htm
4. High Sherrif of the Lowcountry – J.E. McTeer – https://books.google.com/books/about/High_Sheriff_of_the_Low_Country.html
5. Sam Doyle – National Gallery of Art – https://www.nga.gov/features/exhibitions/outliers-and-american-vanguard-artist-biographies/sam-doyle.html
6. Sam Doyle – Smithsonian American Art Museum – https://americanart.si.edu/artist/sam-doyle-7400
7. Uncommon Folk – Sam Doyle – South Carolina PBS – https://www.knowitall.org/video/uncommon-folk-sam-doyle
8. Artist Spotlight: Sam Doyle (American, 1906–1985) – Gibbes Museum of Art – https://www.gibbesmuseum.org/news/artist-spotlight-sam-doyle-american-1906-1985/

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23/12/01 – I’ve noticed that I get some web traffic to this page, so I spruced it up a bit to remove some dead links and add references. The reason I originally published this is that we had two Sam Doyle paintings in a restaurant I worked and I always had folks asking about them. I think they were sold to a collector in Japan when it shut down in 2003 or so. One of them was also of Dr. Buzz, who I made an effort to learn about from the High Sherrif of the Lowcountry Book I had bought down in Beaufort.

Dead Links:

• http://northbysouth.kenyon.edu/1998/art/pages/doyle.htm
• https://rawvision.com/back/doyle/doyle.html
• http://www.art.org/exhibitions/archives/2001/doyle.htm
• https://folkart.org/mag/delmas/delmas.html