Self-taught as a wood engraver, Richard Shirley Smith has drawn upon the inspirations of Italian architecture, theatre, poetry and classicism to become recognised as one of Britain’s finest classical illustrators and engravers. Richard Shirley Smith was born in Hampstead in 1935, the son of a Harley Street heart specialist. As a young child, he moved with his family to Brimpton, Berkshire, where he first met the composer, Gerald Finzi and his wife Joy, an artist and writer. The time he spent at their home in Ashmansworth and the rooms there dedicated to reading, composition and sculpture had a profound effect on the young Shirley Smith and the Finzis would remain a strong influence over him throughout his career. He was educated at The Hall School in Hampstead, and at Harrow, where he was taught art by the illustrator Maurice Percival. Whilst boarding at Harrow, he lived next door to the painter and war poet, David Jones.
After completing his national service in the Royal Artillery British Army of the Rhine, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1956 to 1960 under John Aldridge and Anthony Gross.
In 1960, Richard Shirley Smith travelled to Rome with his wife, Juliet Wood, whom he had married that year, and studied there for six months, before travelling to Anticoli Corrado, beyond Tivoli, where he taught himself wood engraving. While in Anticoli Corrado, they were visited by Joy Finzi, who was working on a group of poems entitled A Point of Departure, inspired by her grief at the death of her husband. Shirley Smith used his newly acquired skill as a wood engraver to produce seventeen engravings for the poems, which would eventually be published in 1967 by Golden Head Press. On his return to England, he showed these engravings to Anthony Gross, his teacher from the Slade, who subsequently introduced him to Faber & Faber and Oxford University Press. In 1963, he held his first solo exhibition, at the Mount Gallery in Hampstead.
Having settled back in England, Richard Shirley Smith began lecturing part-time at St Albans and Watford School of Art and working as an extra mural lecturer for London and Bristol Universities. In 1966, aged 27, he became the youngest Head of Art to be appointed at Marlborough College, a position he held until 1971. Between 1969 and 1971, he made three research expeditions to the Villas of the Veneto, the results of which were published in a set of four educational slide strips, The Story of the Venetian Villas, in 1973.
In 1970, Richard Shirley Smith was commissioned by John Dreyfus, the typographer and agent for the Limited Editions Club of New York, to produce 42 wood engravings for Stephen Spender’s The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. When this edition was published the following year, it established his reputation as one of the country’s leading and most sought after engravers. In 1973, he illustrated Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son for the Folio Society, for whom he also illustrated the Earl of Rochester’s Perfect and Imperfect Enjoyment (1992) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1995). In 1976, he was commissioned to paint a trompe l’oeil for the Doric Villa in Regent’s Park, London. This would be the first of twelve such commissions, including one for the Regalian Project at Kensington Palace Gardens in 1991. Since 2002, he has completed a three storey mural at Sheepdrove in Hungerford, Berkshire, entitled The Cycle of Life, and the mural Laskett Shades for historian Sir Roy Strong.
At the age of fifty, in 1985, Richard Shirley Smith was celebrated with a Retrospective Exhibition that went on display at the Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford and the RIBA Heinz Gallery in London, after which the Ashmoleon acquired a complete set of his wood engravings. In 1994, the collection The Wood Engravings of Richard Shirley Smith, written by Iain Bain, was published by Silent Books. His collected bookplates were published by The Fleece Press in 2005.
In May 1999, Chris Beetles Gallery held a major solo exhibition of the work of Richard Shirley Smith.
His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the British Museum and the V&A; the Ashmolean Museum and Bodleian Library (Oxford) and Yale University (New Haven, CT).
