Rash's Surname Index
Notes for William Thomas SMEDLEY
Smedley, William Thomas, (Mar. 26, 1858 - Mar. 26, 1920), portrait painter and a
leading illustrator of his time, was born in West Bradford, a township of
Chester County, Pa., of Quaker stock. He was the second of six children of
Peter and Amy Anna (Henderson) Smedley, and a descendant of George
Smedley, who emigrated from Derbyshire, England, about 1682. His father was a miller and had operated mills in various places. At fifteen Smedley left school to enter a newspaper office. After studying for a time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he went to New York in 1878 as a draftsman for the illustrated periodicals; later he went to Paris and studied painting under Jean-Paul Laurens. From about 1880, when he opened a studio in New York, until 1906, when he turned to portrait painting, he divided his time between painting and illustrating. His work in black and white for Harper's Monthly Magazine and other illustrated magazines soon brought him a well-earned reputation for subtle interpretation of character, and he became one of the most important illustrators of contemporary social life. Not even Charles Dana Gibson portrayed the social characteristics of his day more lovingly and completely than Smedley. In 1882, commissioned by the publishers of Picturesque Canada, he traveled through the western part of the dominion for the purpose of making a series of illustrations, and in 1890, after several sketching tours in the United States, he went around the world, pausing in Australia long enough to make some interesting drawings for an illustrated publication on that country. At the exhibition of the American Water Color Society in the same year, his "A Thanksgiving Dinner" was awarded the
William T. Evans prize and with his "One Day in June" became part of the
Evans collection. On Nov. 27, 1892, he married May Rutter Darling, daughter
of Edward Payson Darling of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., by whom he had two
daughters and one son. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters,
the American Water Color Society, and the National Academy of Design
(1905), he received medals at the International Exposition at Paris in 1900; at
the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901; and at the National Academy
exhibitions, 1906 and 1907. A book of his drawings was published in 1899
under the title, Life and Character. He died on the sixty-second anniversary of
his birth at his home in Bronxville, N. Y. A large collection of his original
drawings is in the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.; other examples of
his work are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National
Gallery of Art, Washington. Prolific as he was, his work never suffered from
lack of thought or preparation. His portraits were satisfying likenesses,
skilfully and pleasingly done in academic style, but he was preëminently the
illustrator and the historian of the middle class. His water-color drawings
exhibited at the Avery Galleries, New York, in 1895 included many diverting
glimpses of fashionable life at Bar Harbor, Narragansett Pier, Washington,
and New York. As records of the American scene in the nineties such drawings as his "Afternoon at the Country Club," "Christmas Shopping on West Twenty-Third Street" and "The Meadowbrook Races" have an undeniable authenticity and historical value. "The pretty girls . . . in wonderful toilettes,
and the well-groomed old gentlemen in their offices or clubs," his customary
types, were depicted admirably, with a faint touch of humor. Perhaps no
American illustrator has understood better than he the manners and customs of his period as exemplified by typical groups of the genteel class.
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