Study of Old Saw Mill Near Saratoga, New York is an original watercolor from 1881 by American artist, James David Smillie. It is signed in pigment in the lower right image and inscribed in pigment in lower left: Saratoga / Oct. 14 '81. The image and paper measure 9-7/8 x 13-3/4 inches and the title was inscribed on the old backing sheet. This watercolor is from the Smillie estate.
Logging in the Adirondacks began as small operations at the beginning of the nineteenth century and quickly ramped up within twenty years. The vast forests must have seemed inexhaustible and the rivers provided an easy means to float logs downstream to various mills. Smillie seems to been drawn to the picturesqueness of old buildings built over or near water. This theme is repeated in his watercolors Saratoga from 1881 and Rear of No. 1, Portland Pier, Portland, Maine from 1880. With Study of Old Saw Mill Near Saratoga, Smillie captured an old but still functioning saw mill belching black smoke from the chimney. Despite the tranquil scene, the saw mill is a symbol of the vast destruction done by the logging industry to the land, forests, and waterways. The mill situated over placid waters and surrounded by an abundance of trees is far from barren landscape clear cut by the loggers.
James David Smillie, painter and printmaker, was born in New York City on 16 January 1833, the eldest son of Katharine van Valkenberg and James S. Smillie. His father, a noted engraver, had a major influence on nineteenth century American engraving and etching.
James D. Smillie studied at the Poughkeepsie Collegiate School and later at the University of New York. Young James learned the art of engraving from his father and when he was eight years old produced his first etching on copper, a visiting card plate. In January 1846, he tried his first attempt at composition with a watercolor depicting the fall of Satan after Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost. He was employed as a bank note engraver before he and his father started their own engraving business; they specialized in banknotes but also produced the engravings for the 1857 Mexican Boundary Survey Report.
James D. Smillie’s first etching is dated March 22, 1846, and his first published print dates to 1849. He continued in his profession as an engraver in steel and was hired in 1859 by the American Bank-Note Company. This same year he made his first creative or “free-hand” etching, which was portrait of Washington Irving.
After two years traveling in Europe, James D. Smillie returned to New York and took up landscape painting. His younger brother George, also an artist, had a studio in New York City and James rented a room in the same building located at 212 Fifth Avenue. He sought inspiration for his imagery in rural settings in New York State, including the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, eastern Pennsylvania, and western Massachusetts.
James D. Smillie exhibited in the spring exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1864, and also exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association, the Boston Athenaeum, the Artists Fund Society, the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair (to raise funds for the Union wounded), and the Yonkers Sanitary Fair. He was made an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1865 and taught at the Academy in 1868. In 1866, he co-founded the American Society of Painters in Water Colors (the American Water-Color Society), later serving as its president from 1873 to 1879. He was elected a full Academician in the National Academy of Design in 1876, and served as treasurer between 1894 and 1898.
The Smillie brothers had difficultly supporting themselves due to the sparse sales of their paintings and found it necessary to live with their parents. A gift from an uncle allowed the brothers to travel across the country in June of 1871 and live for the better part of four months in Yosemite. During that summer, James drew, painted, and wrote about the majestic splendor of Yosemite. In 1872, Picturesque America was published by D. Appleton and Company of New York. James D. wrote The Yosemite section based upon his journal entries and illustrated it with engravings after his drawings and paintings.
Even after Smillie turned toward painting and drawing, he continued to earn most of his income as an illustrative engraver. Within a few years, his fortune changed and, between 1874 and 1876, he was producing more than thirty-five paintings in watercolor and oil each year.
Smillie headed the watercolor committee for the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876. Held in Philadelphia, it was the first official World’s Fair held in the United States and was a celebration of America’s hundredth anniversary of independence. That same year Smillie was elevated to full Academician in the National Academy of Design and, in 1877, he co-founded the New York Etching Club. He was elected as one of the “original fellows” of the London Society of Painter-Etchers in 1881.
James Smillie married Anna Clinch Cook in 1881. She was the daughter of a prominent New Yorker who was active in society and charitable affairs. The marriage to Anna relieved James of the strain of producing an income and he returned to the medium of etching and several of his etchings were illustrated in the American Art Review and Poets and Etchers. He conducted the first etching class at the National Academy of Design in 1894 and continued to teach there until 1903. Between 1888 and 1896, he produced a body of very painterly florals in drypoint, mezzotint, and roulette.
Smillie’s last years were spent traveling and working as a consultant to Frank Weitenkampf, head of the New York Public Library Art Department, designing print storage at the new library on Fifth Avenue. Smillie donated his father’s engravings and his own etchings to the library’s collection.
James David Smillie is represented in the collections of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; the British Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, New York; the Oakland Museum of California; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Crocker Museum, Sacramento; the Huntington Library, Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California; the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
James David Smillie died on September 14, 1909, in New York City. A memorial exhibition was held in 1910 at the New York Century Club.
