Edward von Siebold Dingle collection

Edward von Siebold Dingle (1893-1975), artist and ornithologist, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to John Rutledge (1856-1919) and Agatha von Siebold Dingle (1856-1947). Growing up on his parents plantation near Summerton, South Carolina, he developed an early interest in birds and in drawing them, painting his first bird, an Eastern Wood-Pewee perched on a pine bough, at the age of twelve. He graduated from Porter Military Academy in 1913 and received his A.B. degree from the College of Charleston in 1917. After serving in the Navy in World War I he moved to Mount Pleasant where he would make frequent trips to the Isle of Palms, Sullivans Island, and other surrounding sea islands looking for rare bird species, especially tropical species blown North by hurricanes. It was during this time that he started to paint professionally. After his marriage to Marie Guerin Ball (1881-1963) in 1927 the couple moved to Middleburg Plantation in Huger, South Carolina, where he lived and worked until his death in 1975.

Largely a self-taught artist, except for some instruction in landscape painting from the painter and printmaker Alfred Hutty, his primary medium was watercolor and he specialized in painting birds in families in their natural habitat or in foliage and often with nests. Many of his paintings would include an adult male and female as well as a juvenile or post-juvenile bird of a particular species. He collected and prepared approximately 1,000 bird skins, learning from noted South Carolina ornithologist Arthur Trezevant Wayne on how to prepare and preserve them. These bird skins would provide Dingle with an accurate basis for his watercolors. His research would lead to the addition of six species to the State List of birds: the Cory's Shearwater, the Glossy Ibis, the Leach's Petrel, the European Widgeon, the Hudsonian Godwit, and the Clay-colored Sparrow.

In 1926 he exhibited in the first American exhibition of bird paintings held in Los Angeles and in 1937 some of his works were included in the First National Exhibition of American Artists at Rockefeller Center in New York. He also exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ten of his paintings were reproduced in the book South Carolina Bird Life by Alexander Sprunt Jr. and E. Burnham Chamberlain and in various publications including Auk and Bird-Lore. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and the Cambridge Museum in Massachusetts.