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American painter From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louise Jordan Smith (March 28, 1868 – December 31, 1928) was an American painter and academic.
Smith was active as an artist in Lynchburg, Virginia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[1] In 1895 she and Bernhard Gutmann founded the Lynchburg Art League.[2] During the 1890s she studied art in Paris for two years, and during that same decade she became chairman of the art department at Randolph-Macon Woman's College.[1] A cousin of the institution's first president, William Waugh Smith,[3] she held that "the only way to develop taste in art is to study paintings frequently, seriously, and at leisure,"[4] and it was she who suggested William Merritt Chase as the artist for his formal portrait, presented to the school in 1907 by the senior class of that year.[5] The first art professor on the college's faculty,[6] it was she who instigated the purchase of Men of the Docks by George Bellows in 1920, an event which marked the foundation of the school's Maier Museum of Art.[7] It was also under her direction that the college held its First Annual Exhibition in 1911, believed to be the first exhibition of modern art held on a college campus anywhere in the United States.[8][9] Furthermore, in 1893 Smith opened her lectures to the women of Lynchburg, which one source claims may have been the first organized system of adult education in Virginia.[8] During her academic career Smith also taught French at the College, and invited prominent artists of her acquaintance to come and speak to the student body.[10] At her death she was buried in the Warrenton Cemetery in Warrenton, Virginia.
Smith's pupils included Georgia Weston Morgan, herself to become a prominent figure in Lynchburg's artistic scene.[1]
In 2018 the Virginia Capitol Foundation announced that Nottingham's name would be included on the Virginia Women's Monument's glass Wall of Honor.[11]
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