SMITH, JESSIE WILLCOX

born Sept. 8, 1863, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S. died May 3, 1935, Philadelphia American painter and illustrator, best remembered for her work, especially with children as subjects, for advertising and for numerous popular magazines and children's books. At the age of 16 Smith entered the School of Design for Women in Philadelphia, and from 1885 to 1888 she studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 188687 she also studied portraiture at the School of Design for Women. She had already sold a few drawings to St. Nicholas magazine when in 1894 she enrolled in a class in illustration conducted by Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute of Arts and Sciences (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia. She also attended informal classes at Pyle's studio and his private school in Wilmington, Delaware, and through him she received her first commissions, to illustrate two books about Native Americans. In 1897, with her friend and fellow student Violet Oakley, she illustrated an edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline. A bronze-medal-winning exhibit at the Charleston (South Carolina) Exposition in 1902 brought Smith to national attention, and in 1903 she won the Mary Smith Prize for best entry by a woman in the annual show of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She continued to win awards, and in 1903 she and another friend, Elizabeth Shippen Green, who shared home and studio with Smith and Oakley, produced an illustrated calendar entitled The Child that was a large commercial success. From that time onward, Smith received a steady flow of commissions. Smith's illustrations, particularly of children, appeared regularly in such magazines as Ladies' Home Journal, Scribner's, Collier's, Harper's, Century, and Good Housekeeping, for the last of which she painted cover illustrations regularly for many years. Advertising illustration was another lucrative field in which she was much sought after. She illustrated a number of children's books as well, including The Child's Book of Old Verses (1910), which she compiled; Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1914); Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1915); Charles Kingsley's Water Babies (1916); George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1919); Ada M. and Eleanor L. Skinner's Child's Book of Modern Stories (1920); and Johanna Spyri's Heidi (1922).