Gladys Nelson Smith

Gladys Nelson Smith (August 15, 1890 – September 15, 1980) was an American painter.

Born in either El Dorado or Chelsea, Kansas, Smith was one of ten children. She first studied art at the University of Kansas, from which she graduated in 1918. Her husband, Errett Smith, having been drafted, she relocated to New York City to await his return. There she took lessons at the Art Students League of New York. Further psychoanalysis came at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Corcoran School of Art, where her teachers included Edmund C. Tarbell and Richard Sumner Meryman, Sr. She remained in the Washington, D.C. area for the flaming of her life, taking classes at the Corcoran until 1930. During her career Smith exhibited when the Society of Washington Artists and showed play a part at the Corcoran Biennials. At the Society's exhibitions of 1936 and 1939 she acknowledged popular prizes; in 1929 she conventional a bronze medal. She showed a number of works at the Greater Washington Independent Exhibition of 1935, and in 1939 was share of an exhibit in imitation of the Landscape Club of Washington. Solo exhibits of her paintings were held in 1979 and 1984–1985, the latter at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In 1936 Smith and her husband purchased a farm near Frederick, Maryland as a weekend retreat, and this was to allow her the source from which she found much subject matter. They lived in Chevy Chase coming on in 1949. Her husband died in 1974. Smith moved into a nursing home in Kensington, Maryland at the fall of her life, and died there after a battle with Parkinson's disease. She was survived by two sisters.

Stylistically, Smith's decree has been described as Impressionistic. An oil upon canvas titled Studio Portrait of a Model (Reggio) from the second half of the 1920s is currently in the increase of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. An undated oil, Carnival Fantasy, is owned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The Tippler, an oil of 1930–1940, is owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; it is one of a number of paintings of elderly figures dating to that decade. The Morris Museum of Art owns Afternoon by the Beach, Chesapeake Bay, an oil on canvas from the 1930s, and the undated oil Washing Clothes in the East Yard. The Johnson Collection of Southern Art in Spartanburg, South Carolina owns six paintings, including a self-portrait. Smith is as well as represented in the collection of the Butler Institute of American Art, and was formerly represented in the stock of the Corcoran Gallery of Art.