Matilda Smith

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British botanical illustrator (1854–1926)

title: "Matilda Smith" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["british-botanical-illustrators", "1854-births", "1926-deaths", "19th-century-british-painters", "20th-century-british-painters", "20th-century-british-women-artists", "burials-at-richmond-cemetery", "british-people-in-british-india", "19th-century-british-women-painters"] description: "British botanical illustrator (1854–1926)" topic_path: "geography/united-kingdom" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_Smith" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary British botanical illustrator (1854–1926) ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox artist"]

Field	Value
name	Matilda Smith
image	Matilda Smith00.jpg
birth_date
birth_place	Bombay, Bombay Province, British Empire
death_date
death_place	London, England, United Kingdom
awards	Silver Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society
elected	Linnaean Society
known_for	Botanical illustration
::

Matilda Smith (30 July 1854 – 29 December 1926) was a botanical artist whose work appeared in Curtis's Botanical Magazine for over forty years.

Biography

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Amorphophallus_titanum_(Matilda_Smith).jpg" caption="Corpse flower, ''[[Amorphophallus titanum]]'' by Matilda Smith. Plate from ''Curtis's Botanical Magazine'', 1891. Smith drew this plant during its first blooming at [[Kew Gardens]] in 1889."] ::

Matilda Smith was born in Bombay, India, on 30 July 1854, but her family emigrated to England when she was a small child.

Smith especially admired the work of Walter Hood Fitch, who was then the lead artist for Curtis's Botanical Magazine. Despite her limited artistic training, Hooker encouraged her to show the magazine her own work, and in 1878 it first published one of her drawings. A dispute over pay between Fitch and Hooker—for whom Fitch had been preparing illustrations for several books—led to Fitch's leaving the long-running magazine in 1877. One consequence was that Smith rapidly became a key illustrator at the magazine, at first working alongside Harriet Anne Thiselton-Dyer. In the period 1879–1881, each issue included some 20 of her drawings, and, by 1887, she was almost the sole illustrator for the magazine. In 1898, she was appointed the magazine's sole official artist.

Over the forty-odd years between 1878 and 1923, Smith drew more than 2,300 plates for the magazine—only 600 fewer than Fitch, although she received much less recognition for this achievement in her own lifetime. In this he follows a pattern first noticeable in the Victorian era of progressively devaluing botany and botanical art as women entered the field professionally. Other authors, however, both now and in her own day, have admired the clarity and precision of her drawing, and her four decades of employment at the center of the British botanical world testifies to a continuing value for her skills.

In the course of Smith's long association with Kew Gardens, she created 1,500 plates for volumes of Icones Plantarum, a monumental survey of Kew's plants then being edited by Hooker. Beginning with Plate 1354, she was the sole artist for this series, with funds being provided to keep her in this role for as long as she chose to do it. She also made reproductions of plates missing from incomplete volumes in Kew's library, and she became the first botanical artist to extensively depict the flora of New Zealand.

She was especially admired for her ability to create credible illustrations from dried, flattened, and sometimes imperfect specimens.

The plant genera Smithiantha (in the family Gesneriaceae) and Smithiella (viz. Smithiella myriantha, a synonym of Pilea myriantha) were named in her honor. The Matilda Smith Memorial Prize sponsored by the Kew Guild in her memory is given to the best practical student.

Death

Smith died on 29 December 1926 at Gloucester Road, Kew, and is buried in Richmond Cemetery.

Publications illustrated by Smith

Cheeseman, T. F. (1914) Illustrations of the New Zealand flora. Wellington, John Mackay.

References

(1927). "Matilda Smith, A.L.S.". Journal of the Kew Guild. Annual Report, 1925–1926.
(1915). "Miss Matilda Smith". Journal of the Kew Guild. Annual Report, 1914–1915.
"John Nugent Fitch (1843–1927)". Victoria University of Wellington.
"Find a will".
(1927). "Miscellaneous Notes. Miss Matilda Smith". Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew).
Durant, S. (2004). "The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists". Bristol: Thoemmes.
"Miss Matilda Smith" {{webarchive. link. (2016-03-04 . Kew Guild Annual Report, 1915.)
Horwood, Catherine. ''Women and Their Gardens: A History from the Elizabethan Era to Today''. Chicago Review Press, 2012.
Blunt, Wilfrid, and William Thomas Stearn. ''The art of botanical illustration: an illustrated history''. Courier Corporation, 1950.
Hemsley, W. Botting. "The History of the Botanical Magazine 1787–1904". In ''Index to the Botanical Magazine''. London: Lovell Reeve & Co., 1906, pp. v–lxiii.
Sampson, F. Bruce. [http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-SamEarl-t1-body1-d14-d4.html "Matilda Smith (1854–1926)"]. In ''Early New Zealand Botanical Art''. Reed Methuen, 1985.
Kramer, Jack 1996. ''Women of Flowers: A Tribute to Victorian Women Illustrators''. New York, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1996.
[http://www.kew.org/discover/blogs/history-working-women-kew "The History of Working Women at Kew"] {{webarchive. link. (2015-09-12 . Kew Royal Botanic Gardens website. Accessed 2007-09-03.)
Parker, Lynn, and Kiri Ross-Jones. ''The Story of Kew Gardens''. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2013.
[[Marilyn Ogilvie. Ogilvie, Marilyn]], and [[Joy Harvey]]. ''The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century''. Routledge, 2003.
Page, Judith W., and Elise L. Smith. ''Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England's Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870''. Vol. 76. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Endersby, Jim. ''Imperial nature: Joseph Hooker and the practices of Victorian science''. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Jackson-Houlston, Caroline. "'Queen Lilies'?: The Interpenetration of Scientific, Religious and Gender Discourses in Victorian Representations of Plants". ''Journal of Victorian Culture'' 11.1 (2006) 84–110. {{doi. 10.3366/jvc.2006.11.1.84

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