British Council − UK at the Venice Biennale

With Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer, Matthew Smith was one three veterans of the Great War showing paintings in the 1938 British Pavilion. An 'instinctive artist' with 'nothing to pass on in terms of theory and method', Matthew Yorke argues, Smith explained in one of his few public discussions of art that he was

attempting, only attempting, to insist that ugliness may exist as cruelty exists, but that an artist can make all things beautiful by his vision.

By 1953, Francis Bacon had recognised Smith as a successor to Turner and Constable, perhaps encouraged by seeing his work alongside the theirs at the 1950 Biennale. For Bacon, Smith was 'one of the very few painters since […] to be concerned with painting – that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable.'

Smith was born into a family of well-to-do Yorkshire industrialists; according to Cyril Connolly, his High-Victorian father, Frederic, 'played the violin, collected musical instruments and wrote sonnets on them, yet nevertheless was determined his son should go into the business and make steel and copper wire like his forbears.'

Keen on bettering himself and his children through culture, Frederic left behind a 5,000 volume library, and named the future painter Matthew Arnold Smith, after the great Victorian poet and school inspector.  He also collected art, although his son would dismissively claim 'I was twenty-one before I saw a good picture'.

Matthew didn't go into the family business of wiremaking, though its profitability saved him a lot of the usual pressures of being a young artist. Instead, after Giggleswick Grammar, he had bad experiences at Manchester Art School and the Slade School of Art, remembering later 'I was trying to learn what they were trying to teach me, but it wasn't what I really wanted'.

He moved to France in 1908, like many of his contemporaries, though John Russell points out 'there was nothing in his attachment to France of that slovenly, easy-going relationship which persuades so many bad painters and writers that they are better off in France than in their own country.' Right up to the end of his life, 'something in the light, in the shape of a cottage, in the cut of a woman's dress, or in the taste of a dish on the table, would suddenly magick him back to the first of his preferred regions'. These were particularly around Pont Aven, where Smith thought his life 'really began'.

Shortly before it disbanded in 1911, Smith attended the Parisian Académie Matisse had run since 1908, although he was too shy to show work to its principal. Nevertheless, that same year he exhibited at the Salon des Independants, and was impressed by an episode in which 'Matisse admonished one man student for not showing enough appreciation of the female form, and frowned a little at him and said: 'Et vous un jeune homme!'' 

In 1912, he married Gwendolen Salmond, a friend of Augustus John's first and second wives, and a more successful student of the Slade. The outbreak of war forced the couple back to England, where, he exhibited with the London Group for the first time in 1916, and became a member in 1920. His poor eyesight – a terrible insecurity throughout his life – excluded him from the Artists' Rifles, but, by 1916, enough fitter men had died for his medical category to be called up. 

Shortly after the birth of his second son Dermot, a brother to Mark, Smith was sent to the front in command of a 100-strong labour company, salvaging ammunition and burying the dead. In September 1917, he was hit in the thigh by what Alice Keene described as a 'twisted piece of metal', and spent much of 1918 shell-shocked; hardly surprising for someone timid even in everyday life. 

Having unsuccessfully applied to work as a War Artist, he was reunited with his friend Alden Brooks in 1918. The two Lieutenants swapped war stories late into the evenings, and formed the basis of Brooks' novel The Enchanted Land (1924). In it, the character Dominique Prad provides an insight into Smith's mindset at this point:

[…] they had brought him back with a terrible wound in his side; and lying there in the dark of the first aid station, doubled up like a thing broken in two, half unconscious with pain, he had seen it all flit by again – not one redeeming feature – his whole life wasted – never known what life was – and now all over, ended, dying. 'Here', said the voice, 'there's still some chance of saving this fellow; put him on the table.' Then, to wild spasms of pain as they lifted him into the light, he had tried to raise himself up on one elbow, look around, swear that, if it were true, he would never do anything else in future but live life, beautiful life, to the full, as it should be led.

In 1922, at the age of 43, he stopped living with Gwendolen, and in 1923 he met Vera Cuningham, a painter, a muse, and the first of a series of models who would inspire his famous nudes of this period.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

According to Keene, 'the rhythm and solemnity of her physical poses and the grandeur of her physical presence – which was matched by the force of her spirit and personality – embodied for Smith his own feeling of nature. Today we think of natural things as vulnerable, easily disrupted and destroyed. For Smith, nature was immensely powerful, yet often in a sense secretive and withdrawn: an ever-changing source of inspiration.'

These paintings formed part of his first solo show at London's Mayor Gallery in 1926, which drew the growing regard of fellow artists. Richard Wyndham remarked on the oddness of watching the 47-year-old being dragged by his young sons around a private view of his 'turgid nudes that still lived, still tempted' and 'landscapes seen with such ferocity of ownership that one would hardly have dared walk the dark roads without the artist by one's side.'

Smith presented 23 paintings at the 1938 Biennale, marking the close of a long period of creativity, during which his reputation had grown as a bold, impulsive colourist, and his focus had moved to Provençal landscape. It was quickly followed by a highly successful sale of his works by his champion, and Venice co-exhibitor, Jacob Epstein. Then, in 1940, Smith was again forced from France by war. This time, he had to abandon a large amount of work in Aix, and by 1941, both Mark and Dermot had been killed serving in the R.A.F.

Later that year, Roald Dahl, then a young fighter pilot, was 'spellbound' by Smith's paintings whilst wandering round London galleries on sick leave. The painter had practically disappeared for a year, and Dahl had to hunt him down through a series of shabby boarding-houses and hotels, before finally turning up, unannounced, in full R.A.F. uniform. This was initially a confusing shock to the elderly painter, but the two men quickly became firm friends; Smith painted his portrait, and Dahl wrote

we went to many places and he taught me many things I would never otherwise have learned, and I shall always feel immeasurably privileged to have been allowed to share a small bit of his life.

The 1950 Biennale ushered in a decade of recognition: a Tate retrospective in 1953, an honorary doctorate from London University in 1956, and, in 1954, a knighthood to add to his 1949 C.B.E. The latter probably had something to do with Still Life, Jugs and Apples (1938), which was owned by the Queen Mother. Perhaps most tellingly, he was consistently praised by fellow painters like Patrick Heron, who called him 'humble and in the most exciting sense, materialistic – concerned to praise the actual and the everyday.'

Smith paid his first visit to Venice in 1958, where Francis Halliday and John Russell noted his 'discreet but watchful presence was greatly prized by those British artists who were exhibiting.' A year later, he was buried at Gunnersbury beside Gwendolen, and a memorial to his sons.

Tom Overton, 2009.

Sources

Alden Brooks, The Enchanted Land (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924).

Kenneth Clark, 'Matthew Smith', in XXIa Esposizione Biennale Internazionale D'Arte – 1938-XVI: Catalogo [Venice exh. cat](Venice: Officine Grafiche Carlo Ferrari, 1938).

Francis Halliday and John Russell, 'Biographical Note', in Matthew Smith: Fifty-Two Colour Plates (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962).

Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, Matthew Smith [exh. cat.] (London: Barbican, 1983).

A Selection of Thirty Paintings by Matthew Smith 1879-1959, exh. cat. (London: Crane Kalman Gallery, 1990)

Cyril Connolly 'Matthew Smith: Job and Prospero' (1962); Francis Bacon (1953); John Russell, 'Matthew Smith in France' (1962); Alice Keene, 'Extract from a Biographical Study, 1983' ; Roald Dahl, 'Searching for Mr Smith, 1979', all in Matthew Smith [exh. cat.] (London: Barbican, 1983).

Malcolm Yorke, Matthew Smith: His Life and Reputation (London: Faber, 1997).