Robert Smirke
British, 1752 - 1845
Painter and book illustrator. He went to London in 1766 and was apprenticed to a coach painter before entering the Royal Academy schools in 1772. In 1775 he became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists, with whom he exhibited (1775, 1777, 1778) his generally small-scale, often monochrome paintings of literary subjects. His works are distinguished by assured draughtsmanship, refined humour and, where appropriate, a rather decorous eroticism. He first exhibited with the Royal Academy of Arts in 1786 and became a member in 1793 with his diploma work Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (London, RA). Smirke subsequently became one of the most prolific book illustrators of the early 19th century. He produced illustrations for the ambitious edition of David Hume’s History of England launched by robert Bowyer in 1792, and he contributed several paintings to the Shakespeare Gallery conceived and launched in the 1780s by the engraver and print-seller john Boydell. Other projects included illustrations for several successful editions of the Arabian Nights (London, 1802, 1810, 1814, 1839) and an edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (London, 1818), which was translated by his daughter Mary. Several paintings from the Don Quixote series survive (London, Tate), and examples of his illustrations can also be found at the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 1804 Smirke was elected Keeper of the Royal Academy by his fellow academicians, but King George III refused to endorse the appointment and it subsequently went to Henry Fuseli. It appears that Smirke’s allegedly revolutionary views made him an unsuitable role model for the Academy’s students. Such views may be reflected in his illustrations for J. Montgomery’s Poem on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London, 1814), and also in the attribution to Smirke of satirical attacks (1815, 1816) on the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom, for which there does not seem to be conclusive proof. Smirke sent his last painting to the Royal Academy in 1813 and exhibited occasionally elsewhere until 1834.
Geoffrey C. Tyack. "Smirke." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T079278pg1 (accessed May 2, 2012).
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