ROBERT HERDMAN-SMITH (1879-1945)
Born in Liverpool in 1879, Robert Herdman-Smith received classical artistic training at the National Training College in South Kensington in London, supplemented by stays at the Académie Julian in Paris, the Royal Academy in Antwerp and that of Munich. He obtained the diploma of art teacher in 1899 and was received in London as a member of the Royal Society of Arts.
In 1902, he chose to go to New Zealand and taught there for many years in Wellington and Christchurch while exhibiting his paintings there. He returned to England in 1921 and settled permanently in Cornwall but continued to travel intensely. It is estimated that during the first thirty years of the 20th century, he visited many countries in Europe and North Africa, continuing to Egypt, Palestine, India, Australia and the United States, and reporting with him many paintings and watercolours.
He began to create engravings around 1925, perhaps thanks to contacts made with another artist living in Cornwall, Geoffrey Sneyd Garnier (1889-1970). Around the 1930s, he began to produce engravings in the Far Eastern style, but it seems that this orientation responded more to commercial concerns than to a personal choice of the artist. The London publisher Arthur Greatorex, noting the success then of the engravings made by Elyse Lord in London and by Dorsey Tyson in the United States, would have advised Herdman-Smith to take this path and that is how he produced 18 prints in the Asian Art-Deco style. It should be noted that these three artists succeeded in creating this style, without knowing each other and without having ever set foot in the Far East !
This trio unquestionably had a brilliant leader, Elyse Lord, a skilful follower, Dorsey Tyson, and a traveling companion, Herdman-Smith : the latter, however, managed to create beautiful images of Japanese exoticism that make him more like a artist from the end of the 19th century than from the 1930s.
The collection
