George Smith

George Smith (1713/14–76), along with his brothers William (1707–64) and John (1717–64), were artists and sons of the General Baptist minister William Smith (d. 1719) of Chichester. The careers of both George and his younger brother, John, were launched in the early 1760s by a series of prizes conferred upon them by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. By the late 1760s, the Smith brothers were earning as much as forty guineas for large landscapes and seven guineas for small pictures, about the same price as paintings by Gainsborough. George, the most successful of the three, became known for his landscapes and still life paintings, usually set in his native Sussex. An imitator of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Smith was much admired in his own day, publishing twenty-seven of his landscapes between 1757 and 1769 in a series known as ‘Picturesque Scenery of England and Wales’. Several of Smith’s paintings were turned into prints by some of London’s leading engravers. Smith’s only volume of poetry, Six Pastorals, appeared in 1770; it was reprinted, along with a memoir, in 1811, edited by the General Baptist minister John Evans of Worship Street, London. As Smith’s anonymous biographer noted in 1811, the artist ‘studied with unremitting attention the book of NATURE’ (George Smith, Six Pastorals [London: Whittingham & Rowland, 1811], 9.) Smith’s devotion to pictorial detail was equal to his allegiance to his Baptist faith, a faith that provoked his biographer to separate him from the general run of painters, a profession ‘little favourable to the due regulation of the passions, and to correctness of moral character’. Smith’s realistic portrayal of nature enabled him to avoid, in contrast to the typical portrait painter, the profession’s ‘most dangerous allurements’. Consequently, such ‘realistic’ imitations of nature were not ‘images’ to be worshipped but rather, as the English Romantics and American Transcendentalists would later argue, visual avenues to the contemplation of the divine, linking the elevated emotions engendered by the painting with a heightened level of religious affection. Consequently, Smith’s ‘leisure’ as a painter and his retirement from city life allowed him ‘to form habits, the result of which was an undeviating rectitude of life and conduct. To this was added a religion equally remote from fanaticism and indifference, and producing in him its best fruits, obedience and submission to God, and benevolence to Man’ (Smith, Six Pastorals, 13, 14).