Worthington George Smith

Worthington George Smith (23 March 1835 – 27 October 1917) was an English cartoonist and illustrator, archaeologist, plant pathologist, and mycologist.

Worthington G. Smith was born in Shoreditch, London, the son of a civil servant. He received an elementary education at a local school and was then apprenticed as an architect. He married Henrietta White in 1856 and the couple had seven children, only three of whom survived childhood.

Smith worked for the architect Sir Horace Jones, becoming an expert draughtsman and a member of the Architectural Association. In 1861, however, he left the profession (having been required to design drains for Sir Horace) and embarked on a second career as a freelance illustrator. He put his former experience to use by producing illustrations for The Builder (a journal still published today) and continued as a regular contributor for the next twenty years.

Smith had an interest in natural history and gardening, and gradually developed a reputation as a botanical illustrator. His work appeared in the Gardeners' Chronicle and in 1869 he became its chief illustrator, retaining this position for the next 40 years. He also contributed illustrations to the Journal of Horticulture and other periodicals.

In 1880, he co-authored Illustrations of the British Flora with the noted botanical illustrator Walter Hood Fitch.

Worthington G. Smith's particular expertise was in fungi, which he collected, studied, and illustrated. He published extensively, writing over 200 articles and papers, as well as several books. His first major work in 1867 was to produce coloured illustrations of poisonous and edible fungi, printed in linen-backed poster format with an accompanying booklet. He published Clavis Agaricinorum (a key to British agarics) in 1870, wrote a popular book on mushrooms and toadstools in 1879, illustrated Stevenson's Hymenomycetes Britannici in 1886, and produced a supplement to M.J. Berkeley's Outlines of British Fungology in 1891.

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