Joseph Smith (art collector)
Joseph Smith (c. 1682 –
Smith the collector
Joseph Smith, a man of obscure origins, was educated at Westminster School before travelling to Venice. He took up residence there in 1700 in the import-export trade and merchant banking house of Thomas Williams, the British consul at that time. Smith eventually headed the partnership of Williams and Smith and made a modest fortune.[6]
Smith's reputation was as a passionate collector[7] of paintings and drawings – both of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters and of living artists – and of manuscripts and books, coins and medals, and engraved gems.[8] Beside Canaletto, among the living painters whom he patronised were Francesco Zuccarelli, of Florence, and the Venetian Giuseppe Zais. Smith's favoured architect for rebuilding the façade of his palazzo was Antonio Visentini.
Smith and the Pasquali press
It was Smith's pleasure to issue lavishly-printed books in extremely limited editions, for which he had the services of
Smith's patronage
Smith's central role in the network of patronage of painters in eighteenth-century Venice, in which he created a market in the taste for vedute, was as the prime facilitator of purchases made by the British aristocrats passing through on the Grand Tour. As the agent for Canaletto for several years (circa 1729–35), he virtually controlled the artist's output, to the benefit of both. It was Smith who arranged for Visentini to engrave thirty-eight of Canaletto's views in 1730,[13] and Smith who encouraged the artist to make his successful trip to London in 1746.
Smith himself was a passionate collector of contemporary Venetian paintings and drawings, as well as etchings and engravings. In 1768, he published a facsimile of the original edition of Andrea Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura of 1570.
In 1762, Smith sold the vast majority of his books, gems, coins, prints, drawings and paintings – including many works by Canaletto – to the young George III for £20,000. The books today form the nucleus of the King's Library, now transferred from the British Museum to the British Library, while the Royal Collection retains his other treasures.
Musical Smith
Smith's other passion was for music, which he indulged in part by marrying the noted but temperamental soprano
"Consul" Smith
His appointment as British consul was
Dispersing the collections
George III began to form his library by purchasing Smith's in virtually its entirety in 1765, for £10,000; it forms that part of the British Library known as the "King's Library".[16] Smith did not stop collecting; the dispersal of his second collection of books by auction in London took thirteen days in January–February 1773.[17]
Many of Smith's paintings also went to the British Royal Collection, through the mediation of James Smart Mackenzie, brother of
A generous selection of his manuscripts were purchased by
Legacy
At quite an advanced age, the widowed consul Smith, his wife having died in 1756, married a sister of John Murray, resident at Venice and afterwards British ambassador to
The palace that Smith owned in Venice is now known as Palazzo Smith Mangilli Valmarana. Smith's summer villa in the terraferma was at Mogliano Veneto; it does not survive.
Notes
- ^ a b "No. 8312". The London Gazette. 20 March 1743. p. 10. Dates given in the London Gazette prior to 1752 are old style, by modern standards, with the year beginning on 1 January, rather than 25 March, this date falls in 1744
- ^ "No. 10072". The London Gazette. 20 January 1761. p. 7.
- required.)
- ^ The standard biography is Frances Vivian, Il Console Smith mercante e collezionista (Vicenza) 1971.
- ISBN 9783777452500. The other nucleus of Windsor drawings comprises the drawings collected by Cardinal Alessandro Albani, purchased through the agency of Robert Adam's brother James.
- incunabula, a mark of genuine curiosity.
- ^ "His mania for collecting eventually reached such proportions that Carlo Goldoni dedicated an appropriate new comedy of the carnival season of 1750 to him – La famiglia dell' antiquario", notes William Barcham, "Canaletto and a Commission from Consul Smith' The Art Bulletin 59.3 (September 1977:383–393) p. 385 note 9.
- ^ The gems were catalogued by Antonio Francesco Gori, and published in a sumptuously illustrated volume, Dactyliotheca Smithiana (1767, after Gori's death), after more than half the collection had been purchased on behalf of George III.
- ^ Pasquali's only contemporary rivals among the presses of Venice were Albrizzi and Zatta.
- ^ "Catalogue of extremely rare books".
- ^ DNB
- ^ Bibliotheca Smithiana, seu Catalogus Librorum D. Josephi Smithii Angli (Venice 1755).
- ^ Issued with a title page Urbis Venetiarum Celebriores and the date 1736 but under way in 1730, as F.J.B. Watson showed, "Notes on Canaletto and His Engravers-II" The Burlington Magazine 92 No. 573 (December 1950:351–354) p. 351.
- ^ Seven of the eleven bear the date "1746".
- ^ Anthony Blunt, "A neo-Palladian programme executed by Visentini and Zuccarelli for Consul Smith," The Burlington Magazine 100 (1958:283–84).
- ^ British Library: "The printed books of King George III" Archived 16 September 2008 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ The auctioneers were Baker & Leigh, precursors of the auction firm Sotheby's.
- ^ A King's Purchase: George III and the Collection of Consul Smith, exhibition catalogue The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace
- ^ Noted by Paul Davies and David Hemsoll, "Sanmicheli through British eyes", in John Bold and Edward Chaney, eds., English Architecture, Public and Private: Essays for Kerry Downes. 1993:123.
- ^ Goethe, Italian Journey 1786–1788, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, translators, (New York) 1962:81. Smith's Palladio was also the choice of New York's Beaux-Arts architectural firms at the end of the nineteenth century.