Matilda Smith
| Matilda Smith | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 1854 Bombay, India |
| Died | 1926 |
| Known for | Botanical illustration |
| Awards | Silver Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society |
| Elected | Linnaean Society |
Matilda Smith (1854–1926) was a botanical artist whose work appeared in Curtis's Botanical Magazine for over forty years. She became the first artist to depict New Zealand's flora in depth, the first official artist of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and only the second woman ever elected to the Linnaean Society.
Matilda Smith was born in Bombay, India, on July 30, 1854, but her family emigrated to England when she was a small child. Her interests in botany and botanical art were fostered by her second cousin Joseph Dalton Hooker, whose daughter Harriet would also go on to become a botanical illustrator. Hooker was then the director of Kew Gardens and a talented draughtsman in his own right, and he brought Smith into the Gardens to train as an illustrator.
Smith especially admired the work of Walter Hood Fitch, who was then the lead artist for Curtis's Botanical Magazine. Despite her limited artistic training, Hooker encouraged her to show the magazine her own work, and in 1878 it first published one of her drawings. A dispute over pay between Fitch and Hooker—for whom Fitch had been preparing illustrations for several books—led to Fitch leaving the long-running magazine in 1877. One consequence was that Smith rapidly became a key illustrator at the magazine, at first working alongside Thiselton-Dyer. In the period 1879–1881, each issue included some 20 of her drawings, and by 1887 she was almost the sole illustrator for the magazine. In 1898, she was appointed the magazine's sole official artist. Over the forty-odd years between 1878 and 1923, Smith drew more than 2,300 plates for the magazine—only 600 fewer than Fitch, although she received much less recognition for this achievement in her own lifetime. As late as the mid 20th century, art teacher Wilfrid Blunt, in his book The Art of Botanical Illustration, dismissed her as an artist of inferior skills, praising her faintly for her charm, her work ethic, and her usefulness in creating a record of otherwise unpictured plants. In this he follows a pattern first noticeable in the Victorian era of progressively devaluing botany and botanical art as women entered the field professionally. Other authors, however, both now and in her own day, have admired the clarity and precision of her drawing, and her four decades of employment at the center of the British botanical world testifies to a continuing value for her skills.
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