William Thomas Smedley

William Thomas Smedley (1858-1920) was one of the most popular American illustrators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose refined images of upper-class American life defined the visual character of the great age of American periodical illustration. Born at his ancestral homestead near West Chester, Pennsylvania, Smedley began working at the Daily Local News in West Chester at the age of fifteen. The paper's founder, Wilmer Worthington, was an amateur landscape painter, and it was probably through him that the young Smedley was first encouraged to pursue a career in the graphic arts.

In 1877 Smedley left West Chester for the larger urban environment of Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1878 he enrolled in the night drawing class, studying under Dr. W. W. Keen and Thomas Eakins during the height of Eakins's celebrated teaching career. Beyond his rigorous anatomical training, it was at the Academy that Smedley acquired the excellence in perspective and draftsmanship that would define his mature work.

The decades before and after the turn of the century were the heyday of American illustration, and Smedley became one of its central practitioners. Alongside Charles Dana Gibson and, later, Howard Chandler Christy, Smedley's work pictured an elite, upper-class American society. His figures often appear in the latest fashions, engaged in activities appropriate to their privileged class, and his illustrations of dramatic narrative moments show men and women who embody an ideal of Victorian respectability. His women are endowed with beauty tempered by virtue, while his men are gentlemen ennobled by graciousness.

By the early 1880s Smedley had moved to New York City, where he joined the celebrated Tile Club at the heart of the American art community. His work began appearing regularly in Harper's Weekly, Harper's Young People, Harper's Monthly, Scribner's, and St. Nicholas. His pictures combine exciting composition, exceptional use of light and shadow, and a rare gift for visual storytelling, and his early gouaches and watercolors with their subtle tonalities and crisp highlights are enchanting works in their own right. In 1981 and 1982, John H. Gorman published a catalogue raisonné in collaboration with an exhibition at the Brandywine River Museum and Kennedy Galleries, restoring critical attention to Smedley's important place within the history of American illustration.