A native Charlestonian, Smith used her art to bring attention to the beauty and heritage of Charleston and the surrounding Lowcountry. The Gibbes owns a series of thirty original watercolors she created for the book "A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties," which was published in 1936. In "A Rice Flat in One of the Canals," Smith applied thin washes of vibrant color to create a romanticized image of life on a South Carolina rice plantation in the 1850s.