Robert Borlase Smart Biography

Robert Borlase Smart, known as Borlase Smart (1881-1947) in St Ives, Cornwall) worked as an art editor and critic on the Western Morning News/Illustrated Western Weekly News from 1901 to 1913, but is principally known as an artist, in which capacity he became a founding member of the St Ives School during the years following his return from the First World War.

Borlase Smart studied at Plymouth Art College between 1897 and 1900,[2] and obtained, after a further year's study, a first class honours certificate in teaching from the Royal College of Art in 1901.

Smart worked as an art editor and critic at the Western Morning News, which became the Illustrated Western Weekly News, from 1901 to 1913. During this time, he continued to paint.

In 1912, his painting ‘Moonlight on the Cornish Riviera’ made it through the selection process and was hung in the Royal Academy Summer Show. Following this recognition of his abilities, he decided to become a professional artist, and he gave up his post as a journalist and moved to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1913 to study seascape painting. He became a student at the School of Painting, which had been established by Julius Olsson in 1895.

During the First World War, he served with the Artists' Rifles, the Machine Gun Corps, the London Regiment and the Queen’s Regiment. During the conflict, he made charcoal and wash drawings which illustrated the conditions that the soldiers endured at the front and the destruction of towns and villages on the Somme, at Arras and at Ypres. These drawings were exhibited at the Fine Art Society in London in 1917, The Harris Galleries in Plymouth and Lanham’s Gallery in St Ives in 1919. In 1916, he met and established a lifelong friendship with Leonard Fuller while they were producing illustrations of the Lewis gun.

In 1919, Smart, now married, moved to St Ives to occupy the Ocean Wave Studio. With an abundance of energy and enthusiasm, Smart began, in the three decades that followed, to gain a reputation as a fine painter and an organiser and promoter of the St Ives artistic community.

He was considered a man of vision and highly regarded within the West Cornwall art community as someone with a readiness to accept and encourage emerging talent.

He exhibited at the first exhibition of the Society of Graphic Art in London in 1921.

Borlase Smart published several books on the techniques of painting (including 'The Technique of Seascape Painting', published in 1934), and was a key figure in the final year of his life, in establishing a permanent home for the St Ives Society of Arts in the Mariners' Church.

He married Kathleen Irene Godson on 31 October 1917.

They had two sons, Michael, born in 1926 and Brian, born in 1929.

He died at home on 3 November 1947 of a heart attack.