Author: Smith, George
Biography:
SMITH, George (1713-76: ODNB)
Smith was born in Chichester, Sussex, in 1713, the second of three sons of a baker, William Smith, and his wife Elizabeth Spencer. His father, like his father before him, served his community also as a Baptist minister, but he died in 1719. All three boys made careers for themselves as artists. The eldest, William (1706-64), under the patronage of Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond (1735-1806), became the pupil of a London portraitist and worked mainly in London and Gloucester. He taught George, who returned to Chichester and, with the encouragement of the same patron, specialised in landscapes. John Smith (1716-64) became his pupil. They all took prizes and made a living from their work, but George was the best known of them. He appears to have been the only one to have a family of his own: on 12 Sept. 1766 he married Ruth Southen (d 1795) at St. Olave’s, Chichester, and they had three daughters. In a preface to Six Pastorals, Smith says that it was his attentive study of nature that led him to formulate ideas that he thought might be new. Reviewers were respectful. Long after his death at Chichester on 7 Sept. 1776, in 1811 his three daughters brought out a second edition of the work with some added material from manuscript, with the assistance of an editor, J. Evans. It contains an impressive list of subscribers and is dedicated to the current Duke of Richmond, Charles Lennox (1764-1819). That edition includes a memoir which is the primary source of most later biographies. (ODNB 3 Nov. 2024; ancestry.com 3 Nov. 2024; findmypast.com 3 Nov. 2024; MR 43 [Oct. 1770], 285-8; CR 29 [June 1770], 475-6) HJ