Sarah Stone (artist)


Sarah Stone, later known as Sarah Smith, was an English natural history illustrator and painter. Her works included many studies of specimens brought back to England from expeditions in Australia and the Pacific. Her illustrations are amongst the first studies of many species and are as scientifically significant.

Work

Stone worked as a draftsman, natural history and scientific illustrator, and painter between 1777 and 1820.
She was commissioned by Sir Ashton Lever in the 1770s to sketch and paint images of objects in his Leverin Museum. which included specimens brought back by British expeditions to Australia, the Americas, Africa and the Far East in the 1780s and 1790s. She exhibited as an "Honorary Exhibitor" at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1781, 1785 and 1786. Stone created numerous watercolour paintings of specimens sent by John White, the First Surgeon General of the Australian colony, between 1789 and 1790. These paintings were used to produce engravings for White's A Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales. Although beautiful and skilfully drawn the drawings were sometimes compromised by the fact that she was working from skins collected in Australia and reconstructed by a taxidermist in London to reproduce an animal or bird that had never been seen.
Stone's work is held by the British Museum, the National Library of Australia, and the State Library of New South Wales.

Personal life

On 8 September 1789 Stone married John Langdale Smith.

Gallery

Images by Sarah Stone - A journal of a voyage to New South Wales.