Matthew Smith (artist)

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Sir Matthew Arnold Bracy Smith (1879 - 1959) was an English painter.

Smith was born at 30 Elmfield Terrace, Halifax, Yorkshire, on 22 October 1879, the second of the four sons of Frederic Smith (1849–1914), wire manufacturer, and his wife, Frances (Fanny) Holroyd (d. 1912). He was educated at Heath grammar school, Halifax (c.1890–1895), and Giggleswick School, Settle, Yorkshire (1895–7). His childhood and youth were dominated by the commanding figure of his father, a strict nonconformist who went to chapel twice every Sunday, ran his business with notable success, and in his spare time passed for a lover of the arts. Frederic Smith's collection of violins was well known to visiting virtuosi; he had published a book of Browningesque verses; and he had commissioned a painting, Stradivarius in his Studio, from Seymour Lucas.

Attempts to place his son in the business world were a failure and in the face of his father's intense disapproval Matthew Smith won permission to study applied design at the Municipal School of Technology, Manchester, in 1901. His range of activity was severely restricted— ‘I was twenty-one’, he later said, ‘before I saw a good picture’ (Matthew Smith: Fifty-Two Colour Plates). But an iron determination lay concealed within his frail body and apparently timorous nature and at the late age of twenty-six he was allowed to go to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He was unhappy there, often being handled roughly by Henry Tonks in front of the entire class, and on his doctor's advice he went to Pont-Aven in Brittany in the late summer of 1908—a decision, he would often say, which marked the true beginning of his life.

Pont-Aven's heyday as an artistic centre had passed, but Smith fell in love with France and with French life, and thereafter never felt really at home anywhere else. Enough of the tradition of Paul Gauguin lingered in Pont-Aven for him to learn the uses of pure colour, as distinct from the tyranny of ‘pure drawing’ maintained at the Slade. When he moved to Paris he was able to show, in 1911 and 1912, at the Salon des Indépendants in company with Matisse, Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, and Georges Rouault. He was lucky enough, also, to glimpse Matisse and his methods at first hand through attendance at the school, soon to be disbanded, which Matisse had run since 1908; and if his personal contacts with Matisse were slight, the experience was revelatory in the highest degree.

Towards 1914 Smith's personal circumstances were radically altered by the death of his mother and father and by his marriage, on 10 January 1912, to (Mary) Gwendolen (Gwen) Salmond (1877–1958), who had studied successfully at the Slade in the 1890s and was a close friend of both Gwen John and Ida Nettleship (Augustus John's first wife). Her two brothers were Sir Geoffrey Salmond and Sir John Salmond.

Smith had yet to show a painting in England, but when the First World War forced him and his wife to interrupt their sojourns in France he took a studio in Fitzroy Street, London, where Walter Sickert and Jacob Epstein were among his neighbours. There he painted the first of the pictures in which the lessons of France were truly digested, and in 1916 Epstein persuaded him to show a painting in the London Group exhibition. In 1917 Smith was commissioned as an officer in the labour corps and that year was wounded by shrapnel during the battle of [[[Passchendaele]]. Shortly before he was demobilized he met the Irish artist Roderic O'Conor (1860–1940) in Paris. Of all his contemporaries O'Conor provided Smith with the greatest inspiration and support. In 1920 Smith went with his wife and their two sons to Cornwall. At St Columb Major he produced a series of landscapes in which the dark, saturated colour of Gauguin was happily combined with reminiscences of the spatial organization in certain Florentine predella panels. With the two ‘Fitzroy Street nudes’ of 1916 these constitute his first original contribution to English painting.

Smith had always been delicate, and there was throughout his life an apparent discrepancy between his aghast and tentative approach to the practical aspects of living and the imperious energy which went into his work. Early in the 1920s the normal shortcomings of his health allied with the sense of something unfulfilled in his personal life combined to produce a serious breakdown; and it was not until he found in Vera Cuningham the ideal model for his art that he recovered and, indeed, redoubled his ability to work. He took a studio at 6bis Villa Brune in Montparnasse, Paris, and was soon producing one after another of the long series of female nudes which established him as one of the few English painters ever to master this most exacting of subjects. Of Femme de cirque (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) Roger Fry wrote: ‘It is a picture planned in the great tradition of pictorial design, and carried through without any failure of the impulse’ (‘The Mayor and Claridge Galleries’, The Nation and the Athenæum, 1 May 1926, 126–7).

From 1923 until 1940 Smith enjoyed a period of unbroken creativity. If Paris and the nude were predominant in the twenties, in the thirties his interest shifted to Provence, in geographical terms, and to landscape as his preferred theme. Throughout these years his first responsibility was owed to his work; and although he was a devoted father he was inflexible in his will to cut free from any entanglement which might impair the freedom to work which he had sought for so long and had found only in his middle forties.

In June 1940 Smith had to be evacuated from France by the RAF and he left behind many canvases in Aix-en-Provence. There followed a period of great private unhappiness on more than one count; above all, the loss of his two sons on active service was a blow from which he took a long time to recover. The petty vicissitudes of London life during and after the war found in Smith a most consistent victim; he was troubled, also, by an affliction of the eyes which later caused him to undergo a cataract operation. He found renewed energy painting portraits. Augustus John and the novelist Henry Green sat for him, as did many women, among them the actresses Valerie Hobson and Patricia Neal. The largest and most varied series of works was inspired by Mary Keene, née Hunt (1921–1981), who remained close to him until his death. She wrote a novel, Mrs Donald (1983), in which the love affair was partly drawn from her relationship with Smith.

Smith's natural toughness empowered him to go on working, and the still lifes and large decorative subjects of the mid-fifties have a grandeur of spirit and an unforced amplitude which put them very high in the canon of his work. In 1955 he developed pancreatic cancer, the illness from which he eventually died; but even when it was clear that life was withdrawing its benefits one by one he went on working as best he could. In his last years there was a general realization that as a master of paint he had had few rivals among twentieth-century English artists. He was appointed CBE in 1949 and knighted in 1954. In 1953 a large retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the TateGallery, London, and in 1956 the University of London awarded him the honorary degree of DLitt. Equally precious was the affection and respect in which he was held, not only by such lifelong friends and colleagues as Augustus John and Jacob Epstein but also by younger artists—Francis Bacon above all.

Smith was most often talked of as a colourist, but he did not altogether care for the appellation. ‘They all praise the colour’, he would say, ‘but if the pictures hold together there must be something else, you know. There must be something else’ (Matthew Smith: Fifty-Two Colour Plates). Tenaciously, though with characteristic discretion, he had studied Ingres, Courbet, Rembrandt, and Tintoretto. His landscape practice was based to a surprising degree on the study of Rubens's landscape sketches. He read enormously in an unstudied way, and although he was the last man to ‘keep up with’ his friends in a conventional sense, few people have had a securer hold on the affections of others. He spoke, someone once said, ‘like a highly intelligent moth’ (personal knowledge); but, once his confidence had been won, the high seriousness implicit in two of his given names (Matthew Arnold) was allied in his talk with an idiosyncratic and unforgettable sense of fun.

Matthew Smith died at 23 Acacia Road, St John's Wood, London, on 29 September 1959 and was buried at Gunnersbury, Middlesex. The Royal Academy mounted a memorial exhibition of 255 works in 1960. In 1974 Mary Keene, whom Smith had made his heir, presented over 1000 works to the corporation of London. A section of the Barbican Art Gallery, London, is permanently devoted to the display of part of this collection. The first full biography, Alice Keene's The Two Mr Smiths (1995), establishes the facts of Smith's life and work, while the second, Malcolm Yorke's Matthew Smith: his Life and Reputation (1997), discusses his unique place within early and mid-twentieth-century British art.