Jsoeph Smit Biography

Joseph Smit (1836-1929) was a Dutch zoological illustrator.

Smit was born in Lisse on 18th July 1836. He received his first commission from Hermann Schlegel at the Leiden Museum to work on the lithographs for a book on the birds of the Dutch East Indies. In 1866, he was invited to Britain by Philip Sclater to do the lithography for Sclater's Exotic Ornithology; he prepared a hundred images for the book.

He also did the lithography for his friend Joseph Wolf's Zoological Sketches, as well as Daniel Giraud Elliot's monographs on the Phasianidae and Paradisaeidae. Beginning in the 1870s, he worked on the Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum (1874-1898, edited by Richard Bowdler Sharpe), and later on Lord Lilford's Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands.

Smit contributed illustrations to John Gould's books on birds of different parts of the world, along with leading Victorian era wildlife artists including Wolf, Edward Lear, William Hart, Henry Constantine Richter and J.G. Keulemans. He also provided many of the illustrations of dinosaurs and other fossil creatures for the popular book Extinct Monsters (1892) by Henry Neville Hutchinson.

He died in his home on Cobden Hill, Radlett, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom on 4 November 1929 at age 93.

His son Pierre Jacques Smit (1863-1960), who used the name Peter Smit, was also a zoological illustrator.

Works to which Joseph Smit contributed:-

Exotic Ornithology Sclater & Salvin, 1869

Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum

The Ibis

Monograph of the Phasianidae, Elliot 1872

A Monograph of the Paradiseidae, Elliot 1873

Jottings during the Cruise of the H.M.S. Curacoa Brenchley

Survey of Western Palestine Tristram

Zoological Sketches Wolf

The Book of Antelopes

Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London

Transactions of the Zoological Society of London

Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Isles, Lilford

Extinct Monsters, Hutchinson 1892

Bulletin of the Liverpool Museums under the City Council

Wild Oxen, Sheep and Goats of all Lands, Living & Extinct 1898