Joseph Smit was born in Lisse, Netherlands, on 18 July 1836. He trained under the naturalist Hermann Schlegel in Leiden before immigrating to England in 1866 to work for the zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater. Smit became one of the leading natural history illustrators working in Britain, contributing hundreds of plates to publications of the Zoological Society of London and the British Museum. Joseph Smit died in Radlett, Hertfordshire, England, on 4 November 1929.
Illustrator Joseph Smit was born in Lisse, Netherlands, on 18 July 1836. Little is known of his family background or early childhood, though he appears to have studied the birds and animals around Lisse from a young age and probably received some formal artistic training (Skipwith, 1979, p. 124). He was drawn to Leiden, where he came into contact with the naturalist Professor Hermann Schlegel, director of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (Holthuis, 1995, p. 44). Schlegel gave Smit his first significant commission, transferring his own drawings onto lithographic stone for De Vogels van Nederlandsch Indie, published in instalments between 1863 and 1866. Unlike his predecessor, Joseph Wolf, to whom Schlegel had entrusted both drawing and lithography, Smit was engaged for the lithography alone (Skipwith, 1979, p. 124). Through this Leiden circle, Smit also became acquainted with the ornithologist Philip Lutley Sclater, secretary of the Zoological Society of London, and it is likely he was already preparing drawings for Sclater's publications before leaving the Netherlands. Smit immigrated to England with his wife and family in 1866, moving to London to prepare 100 drawings of American birds and complete the lithography for Sclater's Exotic Ornithology (1866-69) (Ibid.).
Smit worked chiefly as a lithographer and watercolourist, producing scientifically precise illustrations of birds and, later, mammals (Skipwith, 1979, p. 125; ZSL, 2024). Shortly after his move to London, he met the German-born animal painter, Joseph Wolf, forming a close professional friendship that lasted until Wolf's death in 1899 (Skipwith, 1979, p. 124). Smit lithographed the 100 plates for Wolf's own Zoological Sketches, and the two also worked together on Daniel Giraud Elliot's A Monograph of the Phasianidae and A Monograph of the Paradiseidae, on the second of which the Dutch illustrator Johannes Gerardus Keulemans also worked as lithographer (Ibid.). Smit and Wolf also illustrated Philip Lutley Sclater and Oldfield Thomas's four-volume The Book of Antelopes, for which they supplied 100 plates (Natural History Museum Library catalogue). Smit's style combined the descriptive accuracy demanded by scientific patrons with the careful attention to plumage, fur and anatomy developed under Schlegel. Following Wolf's death in 1899, he was widely regarded as the leading animal artist working in Britain (Ibid., p. 125).
Smit's earliest English patron was the explorer, Julius Lucius Brenchley, for whom he illustrated birds collected on a voyage through the South Sea Islands, published as Jottings. He went on to illustrate for Arthur Hay, ninth Marquess of Tweeddale and president of the Zoological Society, a list of the birds of the Philippine Archipelago reprinted from the Society's Transactions (Ibid.). Between 1865 and 1908, he contributed around 600 illustrations to the Zoological Society's Proceedings and a further 145 to its Transactions, and worked regularly for the journal Ibis and, as printing technology changed, for The Field and Nature (ZSL, 2024). He illustrated the bird section of the report of the HMS Challenger oceanographic expedition of 1872-76, edited under Sclater's supervision, and supplied plates to Canon Henry Baker Tristram's The Survey of Western Palestine (1888) (Skipwith, 1979, p. 125). From the 1870s to the 1890s, his largest undertaking was the 27 volume Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum, to which he contributed extensively, at times assisted by his son Pierre Jacques Smit, himself an illustrator (Ibid.). At this time, he also contributed to Lord Lilford's Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands, provided eleven lithographic pattern plates for Richard Lydekker's Wild Oxen, Sheep & Goats of All Lands, Living and Extinct and, moving beyond ornithology, illustrated Henry Neville Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life.
Although less publicly celebrated than younger contemporaries, such as Keulemans and Archibald Thorburn, Smit remained highly regarded within scientific and museum circles for the accuracy and consistency of his work throughout his long career (Ibid.). He continued to work into the early twentieth century, illustrating W. H. Hudson's The Naturalist in La Plata and contributing, alongside Ernest Bucknall, John Charlton, Lancelot Speed, Charles Whymper, Edward A. Wilson and Alice B. Woodward, to Henry R. Knipe's Nebula to Man.
Joseph Smit died in Radlett, Hertfordshire, England, on 4 November 1929 at the age of 93 (Evening News, 1929); his son Pierre, who had followed him into the profession, subsequently immigrated to South Africa (Skipwith, 1979, p. 125). Examples of Smit's original watercolours and drawings are held in UK public collections, including the Zoological Society of London's library and archive and the Natural History Museum, whose Library and Archives hold at least 42 original works, among them 33 mammal and bird watercolours (c. 1900-07) and 9 giraffe studies from 1903.
Michal Mel
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Joseph Smit]
Publications related to [Joseph Smit] in the Ben Uri Library