Frank Vining Smith Graphite Drawing Landscape With Lighthouse, 1950

Item Details

Frank Vining Smith (Massachusetts, 1879 – 1967)
Untitled landscape with lighthouse, 1950
Graphite on paper
Signed to lower left
Estate stamp to verso

‘Frank Vining Smith, we affectionately called him ’Smithy’, was a distant cousin of mine. Although somewhat far-removed on the family tree, we were very close. I spent the greater part of my childhood summers, from age four on, with Smithy and his family. For many years he resided with his wife Nella Lesta Bonney, her sister Florence Bonney, and their dear friend, Ednah Blanchard at their High Street home in Hingham, Massachusetts.’

-Askart.com

Smithy painted murals on the dining room walls of the house in Hingham. On the west wall he created a typical New England harbor scene, a great brigantine anchored in the forefront, sails half lowered and lazily flapping in the breeze, and in the far distance, a clipper beating its way into the harbor. On the north wall he created a more distant harbor (most likely Canton), with a large Chinese junk, red sails underway. A South Sea island, with swaying palm trees and a schooner on the horizon, occupied the east wall of the dining room.

Frank Vining Smith was born on August 25, 1879 in South Abington, Massachusetts, the son of Franklin Milton and Sarah Porter Vining Smith. His parents separated and Frank spent his childhood being cared for by his mother, grandmother, and sister, Susan. South Abington eventually became Whitman, renamed after Frank’s great grandfather, Jared Whitman. As a boy, Frank spent summers with his grandfather at his cottage on Monument Beach in Buzzards Bay, ‘where’ Frank said, ’ I acquired my love for the water and boats. I swam at six and was sailing at ten years of age.’

Frank graduated from Whitman High School in 1897. He spent the next two years at the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts where he studied under Frank W. Benson (1862-1951), Philip L. Hale (1865-1931), and Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-1938). The following year he studied painting at the Central Ontario School of Design in Toronto. He later moved to New York and attended the Art Students League in New York City, while employed as a newspaper artist and cartoonist for the McClure newspaper syndicate.

Condition

- minor toning and discolorations to sheet

Dimensions

- measures frame.

• Item not examined outside of mounting.

Item #

ITMGM17936