Joseph Smit

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Joseph Smit (1836 - 1929) was a Dutch zoological illustrator.

Smit was born in Lisse. He received his first commission from Hermann Schlegel at the Leiden Museum to work on the lithographs for a book on the birds of the Dutch East Indies. In 1866 he was invited to Britain by Philip Sclater to do the lithography for Sclater's Exotic Ornithology. He also did the lithography for Joseph Wolf's Zoological Sketches, as well as Daniel Giraud Elliot's monographs on the Phasianeidae and Paradiseida. Beginning in the 1870s, he worked on the Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum (1874-1898, edited by Richard Bowdler Sharpe), and later on Lord Lilford's Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands.

His son Pierre Jacques Smit (1863-1960) was also a zoological illustrator.