Louise Jordan Smith

Louise Jordan Smith (March 28, 1868 – December 31, 1928) was an American painter and academic.

Smith was alert as an artist in Lynchburg, Virginia in the late nineteenth and into the future twentieth centuries. In 1895 she and Bernhard Gutmann founded the Lynchburg Art League. During the 1890s she studied art in Paris for two years, and during that same decade she became chairman of the art department at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. A cousin of the institution's first president, William Waugh Smith, she held that "the only mannerism to develop taste in art is to investigation paintings frequently, seriously, and at leisure," and it was she who suggested William Merritt Chase as the player for his formal portrait, presented to the school in 1907 by the senior class of that year. The first art professor upon the college's faculty, it was she who instigated the purchase of Men of the Docks by George Bellows in 1920, an thing which marked the introduction of the school's Maier Museum of Art. It was also under her admin that the teacher held its First Annual Exhibition in 1911, believed to be the first exhibition of objector art held upon a university campus anywhere in the United States. Furthermore, in 1893 Smith opened her lectures to the women of Lynchburg, which one source claims may have been the first organized system of adult education in Virginia. During her academic career Smith as a consequence taught French at the College, and invited prominent artists of her acquaintance to come and talk to the student body. At her death she was buried in the Warrenton Cemetery in Warrenton, Virginia.

Smith's pupils included Georgia Weston Morgan, herself to become a prominent figure in Lynchburg's artistic scene.