Smith was born in Britain in 1836, and graduated at the South Kensington School of Art in London. After graduation, Smith settled in Leeds, where he became headmaster of the Leeds, Holbeck and Keighley School of Art. He also became headmaster of the drawing department of the Leeds Grammar School; Principal Art Master in Huddersfield College in Huddersfield, and superintendent of drawing in schools for the poor in the district of Leeds, Huddersfield, Keighley etc. The early 1860s commissioned by the British Lords of the Committee of Council on Education Smith made a comparison of the French and English systems of art education to suggest improvement and modification of the latter. This resulted in the 1864 publication of Report on the works of pupils, in the French schools of design, recently exhibited in the Palais de l'Industrie, Champs-Elysées, Paris. At the age of thirty-five, in 1871, he emigrated to the United States. In Boston, he became appointed Professor of Art Education in the City ofMassachusetts Normal School of Art, and Massachusetts State director of Art Education. The City of Boston later also appointed him director of drawing for the city, where he had the responsibility to provide art instruction and supervision to classroom teachers in the city of Boston. In his years in the States, he wrote a series of books on art education, and instructional works for teachers, and a drawing book for students of public schools and art schools. He also wrote a work on the Decorative arts, shown at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 in Philadelphia, Pa.. The late 1870s he gave a series of lectures to the Massachusetts Teachers Association and other National Associations on Art and technical education, which were later published. In 1882 he returned to England, where he died in four years later.
Work
Smith was known by the larger audience for his "American textbooks of art education," published the early 1870s, which considerably influenced American art education. For the Massachusetts public schools he had developed an elementary curriculum of drawing, which would "set the standard for art education throughout the Northeast." Another of Smith's accomplishments was a drawing technique, "based on a drawing technique developed by the English designer Christopher Dresser, his method emphasized regular ornament consisting of simple geometrical forms arranged symmetrically."
Art education
Smith wrote one of the first American textbooks of art education, published in 1873. In the preface he declared, that the intention of the work was to cover the whole field of art education:
Industrial design
Smith was an early proponent of industrial design. In his 1880 American Text-books of Art Education: Drawing-books 1 and 2, he predicted their importance, stating:
