James David Smillie

James David Smillie (January 16, 1833 – September 15, 1909) was an American artist.

James David Smillie was born in New York City on January 16, 1833.

His father, James Smillie (1807–1885), a Scottish engraver, emigrated to New York in 1829, was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1851, did much, with his brother William Cumming (1813–1908), to fabricate the engraving of bank-notes, and was an excellent landscape-engraver.

The son studied in the same way as him and in the National Academy of Design; engraved upon steel vignettes for bank-notes and some illustrations, notably F. O. C. Darley's pictures for James Fenimore Cooper's novels; was elected an join of the National Academy in 1865—the year after he first began painting—and an academician in 1876; and was a founder (1866) of the American Water Color Society, of which he was treasurer in 1866–73 and president in 1873–78, and of the New York Etching Club.

He married Anna C. Cook in 1881.

Among his paintings, in oils, are Evening among the Sierras (1876) and The Cliffs of Normandy (1885), and in water colour, A Scrub Race (1876) and The Passing Herd (1888). He wrote and illustrated the article on the Yosemite in Picturesque America. A portrait of Smillie by Henry Augustus Loop is in the hoard of the National Academy of Design, as is different by James Hamilton Shegogue.

His brother, George Henry Smillie, was as well as a painter.

James David Smillie died at his house in New York on September 15, 1909.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Smillie, James David". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 254.