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- Thomas Stuart Smith was a Scottish painter whose colourful life story provided the inspiration for the fictional character of Davie Balfour of Shaws in Robert Louis Stevenson's novels, Kidnapped and Catriona. He was the illegitimate son of Thomas Smith, whose brother, Alexander Smith, was the last in the Stewart line to own the estate of Glassingall. When Alexander died intestate, Thomas Stuart Smith, was ultimately the successful of 18 claimants vying for the inheritance of the estate. He later sold Glassingall and used the money to support his art and to later establish the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling, Scotland. His paintings were significant for the era in portraying black persons as free and independent people during a time when slavery and abolition were hotly contested issues.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Stuart_Smith
Life
Thomas Stuart Smith was born in 1815 as the secret illegitimate nephew of Alexander Smith, who had the estate at Glassingall, Dunblane, Scotland. Alexander's brother, the father, sent Thomas to a school in France whilst he conducted his business in Canada and the East Indies. In 1831 no fees were paid and Thomas thought his father must have died. He returned to England, when he and his uncle learned of each other for the first time. They did not meet, but Alexander advanced sums to him from time to time.
Smith started working as a tutor. He later became interested in painting from an Italian master painter whom he met whilst serving as a traveling tutor to a British family. His uncle Alexander supplied funding so that he could travel and paint in Italy starting in 1840.
By the end of that decade, Smith was having his work accepted by both the Salon des Beaux Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. His first painting at the Royal Academy was bought by Professor Owen, an acquaintance of Edwin Landseer, who was said to have admired it repeatedly.
Inheritance
In 1849 Alexander Smith died intestate. Thomas took possession of the family's estate in 1857 after vying at great expense with eighteen other aspirants. During the eight years that he had waited in hope of his inheritance, he taught art at the Nottingham School of Design. James Orrock, the collecter and watercoulourist, was one of his pupils; he commented on how Smith could paint anything. Smith was known to the Barbizon School of realistic painting, including the animal painters Constant Troyon and John Phillip RA.
Having gained the estate, he kept it just six years. He sold it and used the funds to move to London. His legal costs had been high. His new fortune enabled him to create an art collection at a studio in Fitzroy Square that included his own work. He decided to create an Institute in Stirling to house his new collection. He drew up plans for a library, museum, and a reading room and he offered £5,000 to the council if they could donate a site within two years. He signed the trust into existence in November 1869 with himself, James Barty, the Provost of Stirling and A.W.Cox, a fellow artist, as trustees. He did not see his plans fulfilled as he died the next month in Avignon.
Legacy
Smith is known primarily for founding the Smith Institute, which is now called the Stirling Smith Museum and Art Gallery. Smith also has hundreds of paintings in public ownership.
Two of Smith's works that are still thought to be important are portraits he painted of black men. Unlike other depictions at the time, in which black people were included as servants, Smith's portraits Fellah of Kinneh and The Pipe of Freedom show his subjects as independent and free; they were painted to celebrate the abolition of slavery in America in 1865 following the American Civil War. He also did a smaller painting called The Cuban Cigarette, which has a similar presence. The Pipe of Freedom shows a man lighting a pipe; behind him a slave sale notice has been partially covered by an abolition notice.
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http://www.smithartgalleryandmuseum.co.uk/history/our-history/thomas-stuart-smith
Thomas Stuart Smith was a man of fluctuating fortune with a colourful history who became an artist of considerable accomplishment, widely admired by his fellow artists. His grandmother was one of the Jaffray family in Stirling. The family story was that Thomas’s father and uncle were in love with the same woman, had a disagreement over her and parted. Thomas was illegitimate and his mother died when he was young. His father, a merchant working in Canada and the West Indies, sent the young Thomas to school in France. When the school fees failed to arrive in 1831, Thomas deduced that his father was dead. Thomas and his uncle Alexander Smith who held the estate of Glassingall, Dunblane were shocked to hear of each other’s existence. Alexander Smith, although he never met his newly discovered nephew, provided some financial support for him from time to time.
Thomas Stuart Smith obtained a post as a tutor to a young noble man, travelling with the family to Naples, where he obtained for himself some tuition in painting from a master painter “Marsigli, the first painter here and one of the first in Italy”. In 1840 Thomas made “my first attempt at landscape and my first oil picture”. He was funded by his uncle to study and paint in various places in Italy in the 1840s, and by 1849 was exhibiting both at the Salon des Beaux Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London.
In that year, Alexander Smith died leaving no direct family and no will. Although he had been Thomas Stuart Smith’s main financial support, there was difficulty in proving their relationship, and eighteen people pursued claims on the Glassingall estate. It took Smith from 1849 to January 1857 to secure the inheritance of Glassingall.
The estate was much diminished through the demands of legal fees, and Smith missed the warmth and light of the continent. In 1863 he sold the estate, rented a studio at Fitzroy Square in London and began to build up his own art collection, purchasing from his contemporaries both in Britain and in Europe. With no need to sell his own work, he liked the idea of building an Institute which would house it and his general collection for ‘the welfare of the town and district of Stirling in Scotland’. He drew up a ‘Trust Disposition and Settlement’ for the building of a ‘Museum or Institute’ in Stirling, agreeing to provide £5000 for the building if the town provided a site for it within two years. He had a very specific idea of how the building should be composed of three principal rooms of offices and store rooms, with space left on either side for contingent additions. The style of the building to be plain (Italian), but of first-rate material and construction - the three rooms to be a Museum, a Picture Gallery and a Library and Reading Room, adapted for the benefit of the artisan and working classes.
He intended to oversee the construction himself. The Trust Disposition, naming his fellow artist A. W. Cox, his solicitor James Barty and the Provost of Stirling as Trustees was signed in November 1869. On 31 December he died unexpectedly at Avignon in the south of France.
T. S. Smith was something of an artist’s artist. Having had to struggle to study and practice his art, he had great sympathy for others in the same position,and frequently helped others. The first picture he exhibited in the Royal Academy was a painting of two young artists asking for shelter at the door of a convent in Italy. It was bought by Professor Owen, who had it hanging in his London house. According to Sir William Stirling Maxwell, 'The late Sir Edwin Landseer was struck by it and never visited Professor Owen without taking it down from the wall and examining it with some new expression at the masterly qualities which it exhibited.'
Smith was accomplished in landscape, interiors and excelled in portrait painting too. Whilst pursuing his claim to the Glassingall estate, he lived as an art teacher and portrait painter in Nottingham for a time. One of his pupils, James Orrock (1829-1913) recalled his work with delight and remembered him as ‘a man who could paint anything’, who was a close friend of John Phillip RA, and who knew Troyon and most of the other masters of the Barbizon School. Phillip regarded Smith as ‘one of the best living colourists’.
In the last year of his life, Smith submitted two remarkable portraits to the Royal Academy. Both were of black men of African origin. The Fellah of Kinneh depicts a young man in striped robes. The Pipe of Freedom celebrates the abolition of slavery in America. A smaller study of the same man, The Cuban Cigarette, shows the subject in profile. In subject and presentation, these portraits are quite rare in Scottish painting, and were given pride of place in the Africa in Scotland exhibition in Edinburgh in 1996. They also featured in the Black Victorians exhibition in Birmingham in 2005 and in Manchester in 2006. Black people were sometimes included in paintings. The Lost Child Restored by Sir George Harvey in the Smith’s own collection, where the negro servant is depicted in the doorway is a good example of an incidental inclusion. In Smith’s paintings of black men, the subjects are central, handsome, proud, independent and free. With fellow landowners in the Stirling area managing estates in Jamaica, such paintings would not have been popular. However, another member of the Jaffray family, ‘Citizen’ William Jaffray (1749-1828) had attained local fame through assisting a female slave on the way back to the West Indies to abscond and claim her freedom. His national fame was won through vaccinating some 16,000 children and saving Stirling from the small pox epidemics which raged elsewhere.
The work of T. S. Smith is often overlooked or under valued in Scottish art history. This is because the history is largely market-related. Smith had no need to paint for the board room or the market; his paintings were garnered for Stirling. He wanted his paintings to survive in a single collection, and bought back earlier works for that purpose when he was able to do so.
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1815 - 1869 (54 years)
