Sigmund Abeles takes immediately to the horses at Millwood Plantation.

Artist Sigmund Abeles made friends quickly with Nigel, an Arabian who roams Millwood Plantation, once a grand southern plantation, with 13,000 acres of land and a beautiful mansion. It belonged to General Wade Hampton III, a Confederate general, US Senator, and SC Governor. During Sherman’s occupation of Columbia in 1865 during the Civil War, the home was burned to the ground. Only six huge pillars, weathered and mossy remain.

Abeles’ comfort with horses was a surprise to the students. “I am a volunteer Central Park Mounty,” explained the New Yorker.

Abeles returned to Columbia to work with students in USC’s art department where he had been a student in the early ’50s.

“In those days Edmund Yaghjian, Jay Bardin, and David Van Hook, especially Van Hook, were very supportive” of Abeles’ desire to stay with representational art when abstract art was so much the thing at that time. “They, along with Catherine Rembert and Augusta Wiskowsky, were pretty much the department back then.”

As he talked with a small group of students and photographers along for the sketch session, Abeles also struck up a fast friendship with Peaches Jubilee, the last of the Hampton horses. Robin O’Neil, whose horses board at Millwood, explained that Mr. Hampton, the late patriarch of the plantation, always named his horses for desserts. O’Neil is director of donor development for the Columbia Museum of Art and helped coordinate Abeles visit to Columbia.

Prints Abeles made as part of a student demonstration will become among the first to be marketed by the art department in a new entrepreneurial venture. Through an arrangement with master printmaker Gene Speer, now in residence with the department, the work of visiting artists and students will become limited edition prints for sale.

Abeles studied at USC in 1955, then returned to his native New York to study at the Showhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, thus beginning his tenure on the New York art scene. He has been working, showing, teaching, and writing there ever since.