Anita Miller Smith - Career As An Artist

Career As An Artist

In 1912 Smith ventured up to the art colony at Woodstock, New York, using money intended for a ball gown, and enrolled in the Art Students League summer program. That fall she returned to Philadelphia to take lessons from William Merritt Chase. In an interview with the Poughkeepsie Sunday New Yorker, she described how her deepening commitment to art forced her to move away from Philadelphia. Later on in the article, she said she that she believed it "necessary to dig into the history of the countryside" and that she "didn't see how one could paint the Catskills without knowing something of the people who lived among them, thus reflecting a literary approach to art." In 1913 she commenced studies under John F. Carlson at the Arts Students League in Woodstock.

Smith painted in an impressionist and a post-impressionist manner. She worked in oil, watercolor and graphic media. Primarily a landscape artist, she painted landscapes in a variety of area including New Hope, Pennsylvania, Provincetown, Massachusetts; Charleston, South Carolina, New York, Taxco de Alarcon, Mexico and Paris, France.

From 1916 to 1928 Smith's works were exhibited nationally at such venues as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Toronto, the Woodstock Artists Association, the National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Louisville Art Association. In 1919 her painting Houses in the Dunes won a Lambert Purchase Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy—along with the work of such fellow artists as Paulette Van Roekens and Lilian Westcott Hale.