ON NOVEMBER 2, 2001, NOT LONG AFTER THE SEPTEMBER 11 attacks shook the nation to its core, Ella Walton Richardson unlocked the doors of her new gallery on Broad Street in Charleston. The timing was, by almost anyone’s measure, terrible. The country was grieving. People weren’t thinking about art. And to make matters worse, she’d hung the walls with sweeping winter landscapes painted by a Russian-American artist. “People said they would never sell in Charleston,” Richardson recalls. “They thought I was crazy.”
Twenty-five years later, those snow scenes still sell. And the gallery, Ella Walton Richardson Fine Art, has grown into one of the longest-running and most celebrated on the East Coast.
Richardson’s entry into the art world came in October 1997, when she opened and operated the gallery of her good friend John Doyle at 54 Broad St. It became a rapid success, the first thriving gallery in a district that had previously been the domain of law offices and historic churches. Four years later, she struck out on her own, driven by a vision to bring international artistic voices to a city that, at the time, was largely showcasing regional talent.
By 2007, she’d come full circle, relocating to 56 and 58 Broad St., right next door to where her career had begun. What had been a pair of commercial offices was transformed into a stunning three-room gallery: soaring ceilings, twin working fireplaces, skylights pouring light across the walls, a marble bath with a clawfoot tub and a kitchen that makes visitors feel less like patrons and more like guests.
“I like having the autonomy to create an inviting environment,” she says. “I feel fortunate that most people who visit are in a great mood. It’s hard not to be happy while soaking in the eye candy we offer.”
Today, Richardson represents over two dozen artists whose works span painting, porcelain, jewelry and bronze sculpture, including pieces by the legendary Glenna Goodacre. But a handful of names stand as pillars of the gallery’s identity.
Dr. Craig Nelson has been with the gallery since it opened its doors in 2001. A painter with more than five decades of experience, Nelson is perhaps best described by his own legacy: as the saying goes, he’s forgotten more about painting than most will ever know. His 24th solo exhibition with the gallery opened in March, featuring sun-drenched Lowcountry marshes alongside intimate village scenes gathered from his annual summer workshops in Italy.
Lindsay Goodwin has been showing with Richardson since 2003. A Southern California artist trained at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where Nelson was her mentor, Goodwin is celebrated for luminous, romantically detailed European interiors. She travels to France each year with her family, wandering picturesque villages and Parisian boulevards in search of the imagery she’ll later transform into her dreamy, light-filled canvases.
Then there’s Kevin Chadwick of Lynchburg, Virginia, whom Richardson describes simply as a rock star. Chadwick works in oil, acrylic and mixed media to create richly layered portraits of Southern subjects, figures rendered with striking realism against loose, tapestry-like backgrounds. Since 2017, Richardson has served as his sole representative. His upcoming dual exhibition with Donald Weber of Louisville, Kentucky, opens June 5, coinciding with the Charleston Gallery Association’s First Friday Art Walk and the electric energy of Spoleto Festival USA.
The gallery’s longevity is no accident. Richardson has guided it through hurricanes, the 2007 to 2009 recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, each crisis demanding creativity when the average person had little appetite for fine art. During the pandemic, she pivoted from print mailers to digital catalogs, presenting new works staged inside beautifully photographed homes and office interiors. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and the tool remains in use today.
“In business as in life, the road is rarely smooth,” she reflects, “but if you can keep the faith and have perseverance, you can weather the storm.”
Her most cherished memory, though, has nothing to do with sales figures. It’s the couple from Virginia who walked past her window just days after she opened in November 2001, recognized an Aleksander Titovets painting and stepped inside. They became collectors. Then friends. Then, in Richardson’s words, her adopted family.
Looking ahead, Richardson is dreaming in two directions at once: outward, toward the world, as she’s eager to resume international travel and the soul-replenishing discovery of new landscapes and galleries, and inward, toward a deeply personal project. She hopes to finally finish a book she began years ago, inspired by the wartime love letters her father wrote to her mother during World War II.
“Thank goodness he was a great writer,” she says, laughing, “or I wouldn’t be here today.”
Neither, it seems, would one of Charleston’s most enduring galleries. *
Robin Howard is a freelance writer in Charleston. See more of her work at robinhowardwrites.com.
