English painter. He was interested in painting and drawing from an early age and studied art at Manchester College of Technology (1901–5) and the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1905–8) without, however, showing particular promise. He moved to France late in 1908, and in Etaples and Pont-Aven he painted still-lifes and portraits that are Intimist in manner, showing attention to local colour and modelling (e.g. Portrait of a Young Boy, 1908; priv. col., see 1983 Barbican A.G. exh. cat., p. 9). He settled in Paris and exhibited several of these works at the Salon des Indépendants before beginning to build more ambitious compositions using related and contrasting colours. These show the influence of Fauvism and of Matisse, whose studio he attended briefly in 1910. He also made an intensive study of Ingres, whose work retained particular significance for him. In canvases painted between 1914 and 1920, when he joined the London Group, he acknowledged the flatness of the picture surface with areas of strong unmodulated colour and emphatic design. Fitzroy Street Nude No. 1 (1916; London, Tate) is characteristic in the tension created not only through a bold use of complementary colours—the green shadows of the nude against a vibrant red ground—but also in the contrast between direct observation from the model and the blatant artifice of his colour and exaggerated drawing. In 1920, partly under the influence of Roderic O'Conor's views of Brittany, which he had first seen the previous year, Smith applied dark saturated colour and an increasing fluidity of construction to a series of Cornish landscapes (e.g. Winter Landscape, Cornwall (Swansea, Vivian A.G. & Mus.)). Strongly Expressionist in character, these are the culmination of his early style.
An increasing self-confidence in the 1920s led to the evolution of Smith's mature style; O'Conor's influence again probably contributed to this, together with Smith's love affair with the artist Vera Cuningham (1897–1955), who was the model for many of the figure paintings he made in 1923–6. In marked contrast to his former approach, he now expressed a passionately spontaneous and celebratory response to his subject through an alla prima technique that enabled him to work very fast. In Couleur de rose (1924; London, Brit. Council) the high-keyed, radiant colour, the rapid, rhythmically applied brushstrokes and the model's abandoned pose fuse the various elements of the composition into an organic whole.
Smith continued subsequently to work from traditional subjects, but with marked variations in his palette and use of paint. He spent the late 1920s and 1930s in France and produced many freely painted nudes, still-lifes (e.g. Still-life, 1936; London, Tate), portraits and landscapes. After returning to London in 1940, he moved towards darker colorations and a more emphatic solidity of form, seen for example in his portrait of Augustus John (Edinburgh, N.G. Mod. A.). During the 1950s he produced his largest and most decorative canvases, for example Still-life with a Pitcher II (1954; London, Guildhall, A.G. Store). The greater fluidity of Smith's later work brought him considerable success in regular exhibitions in London, and he was twice represented at the Venice Biennale (1938 and 1950). His work also continued to appeal to later British painters, in particular Francis Bacon, who, in writing of Smith's use of paint as a means of making ‘a direct assault upon the nervous system' (1953 exh. cat.), saw him as a precursor for his own work. Smith was knighted in 1954.