Joseph Smit

Joseph Smit (born July 18, 1836 in Lisse , Netherlands ; † November 4, 1929 in Radlett , Hertfordshire ) was a Dutch-English animal illustrator .

Life

Smit's career began at the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden , where he made his first lithographs on behalf of Hermann Schlegel . Between 1863 and 1866 he created lithographic stones, which served as a template for 50 illustrations in Schlegel's work De Vogels van Nederlandsch Indie . Philip Lutley Sclater , then Secretary of the Zoological Society of London , brought Smit to England, where he made both drawings and 100 hand-colored lithographs for Sclater's Exotic Ornithology , published between 1866 and 1869 . In 1866 Smit emigrated to England with his family and settled inLondon down. Soon after his arrival in England he met Joseph Wolf , with whom he became a close friend. Between the 1870s and the 1890s, several bird and mammal books were published, in which Wolf made the drawings and Smit made the lithographs. After Joseph Wolf's death in 1899, Smit concentrated primarily on mammalian lithographs and was considered one of the leading mammal illustrators of his time in England. He has worked on over 300 color plates in 15 standard works on birds and on 63 color plates for the journal Transactions of the Zoological Society and others for the journals Proceedings of the Zoological Society , Ibis , Nature, and The Field . Smit mainly used bird hides as a model, especially for his over 100 color plates in the 27 volumes of the Catalog of the birds in the Collection of the British Museum , which were published between 1874 and 1899. Other books with illustrations by Smit include Zoological Sketches (1867) by Joseph Wolf, A Monograph of the Phasianidae (Family of the Pheasants) (1870–1872) and A Monograph of the Paradiseidae or Birds of Paradise (1873) by Daniel Giraud Elliot , Colored Figures of the Birds of the British Islands by Baron Lilford (1885), Extinct Monsters (1892) by Henry Neville Hutchinson and Extinct Birds (1907) by Walter Rothschild .

In 1905 Smit settled in the village of Radlett in Hertfordshire. In 1909 he visited his son Pierre-Jacques (1863-1960), who was also an animal illustrator, in South Africa for six months . In 1996, an exhibition of Smit's work was presented at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto .

gallery

Gallery with lithographs by John Smit:

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  Common chimpanzee

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  Dwarf boar

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  Schwarzkopfragopan
  from Daniel Giraud Elliot : A monograph of the Phasianidae, or, Family of the pheasants,
  1872

• 

  Liverpool Dove
  from Walter Rothschild : Extinct Birds,
  1907

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  Spurred flat turtle
  from Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1888

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  Fisk house snake
  from Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London,
  1887

• 

  Yellow-browed organist
  from Philip Lutley Sclater : Exotic Ornithology ,
  1869

• 

  Andean rock cock
  from Philip Lutley Sclater : Exotic Ornithology ,
  1869

• 

  Blauer Pfau
  from Daniel Giraud Elliot : A monograph of the Phasianidae, or, Family of the pheasants,
  1872

• 

  Lesser panda
  from Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1869

literature

• Christine E. Jackson : Dictionary of Bird Artists of the World , Antique Collectors Club Ltd., 1999, ISBN 978-1-85149-203-9 , p. 440

Web links

• Literature by and about Joseph Smit in the WorldCat bibliographic database