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John Thomas, or “Rainy Day,” Smith was born in a London hackney coach, on the evening of the 23rd of June 1766. His mother had spent the evening at the house of her brother, Mr. Edward Tarr, a convivial glass-grinder of Earl Street, Seven Dials, and the coach was conveying her back with necessary haste to her home at No. 7 Great Portland Street. Sixty-seven years later, the man who had entered thus hurriedly into the world left it with almost equal unexpectedness in his house, No. 22 University Street, after holding for seventeen years the post of Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum.

As a writer John Thomas Smith takes no high rank; but he is a delightful gossip, full of his two subjects: London and Art. We know him when he exclaims to a visitor in the Print Room, “What I tell you is the fact, and sit down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story.” Smith’s narrative manner is always that: “Sit down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story.” Such historians are often found in life, mighty recollectors before the Lord, who talk books which no one can inspire them to write. And it is well that when Smith did write he took small pains to be fine or literary. Writing as a man, and not as the scribes, he produced in his Nollekens and his Times one of the most entertaining harum-scarum biographies ever seen, and in his Book for a Rainy Day, or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766–1833, a budget of memories which has perhaps been less read and more quoted than any book of its kind.

Smith’s valuable quality is his interest in the life he lived and saw lived. He was zealous to record those trivial facts of to-day which become piquant to-morrow, a habit that reveals itself in the way he mentions his birth as happening “whilst Maddox was balancing a straw at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, and Marylebone Gardens re-echoed the melodious notes of Tommy Lowe.” In a friend’s album he wrote—

“I can boast of seven events, some of which great men would be proud of:

“I received a kiss when a boy from the beautiful Mrs. Robinson;

“Was patted on the head by Dr. Johnson;

“Have frequently held Sir Joshua Reynolds’s spectacles;

“Partook of a pint of porter with an elephant;

“Saved Lady Hamilton from falling when the melancholy news arrived of Lord Nelson’s death;

“Three times conversed with King George the Third;

“And was shut up in a room with Mr. Kean’s lion.”

These events are more curious than fateful, and, indeed, Smith’s career is little more than a record of plates etched and books published. He is entertaining because he was out and about in London for sixty years, and looked upon anecdotes as “debts due to the public.”

Almost as soon as Mrs. Smith’s hackney coach had brought her to No. 7 Great Portland Street—a house whose site is now covered, as I reckon, by No. 38—Dr. William Hunter, brother of the great John Hunter, arrived from Jermyn Street, and performed his duties with the skill of a Physician-Extraordinary to the Queen. The attendance of such a man proves the material comfort of the Smith family. Nathaniel Smith, the flustered father, was principal assistant to Joseph Nollekens, the sculptor, and he had worked for Joseph Wilton and the great Roubiliac. For Wilton he carved three of the nine masks, representing Ocean and eight British rivers, now seen on the Strand front of Somerset House. He had taken to wife a Miss Tarr, a Quakeress. Their boy’s christening was dictated by family history. He was named John after his grandfather, a Shropshire clothier, whose bust, modelled by Nathaniel Smith, was the first publicly exhibited by the Associated Artists at Spring Gardens; and Thomas after his great-uncle, Admiral Thomas Smith, who had earned in Portsmouth Harbour (more cheaply, perhaps, than Smith would have allowed) the name of “Tom of Ten Thousand.”

Smith early went into training to be a gossiping topographer. Old Nollekens, already a Royal Academician, and the most sought-after sculptor of portrait busts (“Well, sir, I think my friend Joe Nollekens can chop out a head with any of them,” was Dr. Johnson’s tribute to his genius), often took his assistant’s little son for a ramble round the streets. One day he led Thomas to the Oxford Road to see Jack Rann go by on the cart to Tyburn, where he was to be hanged for robbing Dr. William Bell of his watch and eighteenpence. The boy remembered all his life the criminal’s pea-green coat, his nankin small-clothes, and the immense nosegay that had been presented to him at St. Sepulchre’s steps. In another walk, Mr. Nollekens showed him the ruins of the Duke of Monmouth’s house in Soho Square. In a Sunday morning ramble they watched the boys bathing in Marylebone Basin, on the site of Portland Place. And, again, they stood at the top of Rathbone Place, while Nollekens recalled the mill from which Windmill Street was named, and the halfpenny hatch which had admitted people to the miller’s grounds.

In the sculptor’s studio, at No. 9 Mortimer Street, where at the age of twelve he began to help his father, Smith met sundry great people. One day, Mr. Charles Townley, the collector of the Townley marbles, noticed him, and “pouched” him half a guinea to purchase paper and chalk. Dr. Johnson, who was sitting for his bust, once looked at the boy’s drawings, and, laying his hand heavily on his head, croaked, “Very well, very well.” On a February day in 1779, that wag Johnny Taylor, who was to be Smith’s life-long friend, put his head in at the studio door and shouted the news that Garrick’s funeral had just left Adelphi Terrace for Westminster Abbey. Away flew Smith to see the procession, and to record it, in his old age, in the Rainy Day.

As a youth, Smith wished to learn engraving under Bartolozzi, but the great Italian declined a pupil, and it was through the influence of Dr. Hinchliffe, Bishop of Peterborough, one of his father’s patrons, that he entered the studio of John Keyse Sherwin, the engraver. Here he received his kiss from the beautiful “Perdita” Robinson; and when Mrs. Siddons sat to Sherwin for her portrait as the Grecian Daughter, he raised and lowered the window curtains to obtain the effect of light desired by his master.

Three years later Smith launched out as young drawing-master, pencil-portrait draughtsman, and topographical engraver. He found a patron in Mr. Richard Wyatt, of Milton Place, Egham. Through this gentleman he obtained commissions as a topographical artist from influential collectors like the Duke of Roxburgh, Lord Leicester, and Horace Walpole. Moreover, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West sometimes engaged him to bid for them at print auctions. At this time he was a frequent visitor to the drawing-room of Mrs. Mathew, in Rathbone Place, where Flaxman was often found, and where William Blake read aloud his early poems.

The small artist, and particularly the topographical artist, had his chance in the second half of the eighteenth century. The productions of Wilson, Reynolds, Romney, and Gainsborough had stirred up the arts of engraving, which allied themselves closely to literature and life. It was the age of portly topographies and county histories, with their ceremonious array of plates; of itinerant portrait and view painting; and of night-sales of books and prints at which sociable collectors sat under eccentric auctioneers, and at which noblemen were as commonly seen as they were at boxing and trotting matches fifty years later. Shops abounded for the sale of new prints, and auctions were frequent for the distribution of old. Human types were produced of which we know little to-day. Smith has drawn some of them with easy and natural touches in his chapter on the print-buyers who attended Langford’s and Hutchins’ sale rooms, in Covent Garden, in 1783. There he was in his element. Not much passed in the art world in the fifty years following that date that Smith did not know.

When twenty-two, he married. The girl of his choice was Anne Maria Pickett, who belonged to a respectable family at Streatham, and who, after forty-five years of married life, was left his widow. They had one son and two daughters. The son died at the Cape in the same year as his father, 1833. One daughter was married to Mr. Smith, a sculptor, and the other to Mr. Paul Fischer, a miniature painter. Soon after his marriage he was invited by Sir James Winter Lake to take up his residence at Edmonton, where he taught drawing to their daughter, and doubtless had other pupils. When he applied (unsuccessfully) for the post of drawing-master to Christ’s Hospital, Sir James and Lady Lake’s testimonial made a point of the fact that he had never touched up their daughter’s work, “a practice too often followed by drawing-masters in general.” At this period Smith practised as an itinerant portrait painter, a branch of art which then had its vogue, and was to number William Hazlitt among its professors. At Edmonton it was that he “profiled, three-quartered, full-faced, and buttoned up the retired embroidered weavers, their crummy wives and tight-laced daughters.” At Edmonton, too, he watched the reception of his first book, the Antiquities of London and its Environs. Smith’s career for the next thirty years may be conveniently sketched in a list of his residences and the work he accomplished in each.

In 1797 he was at No. 40 Frith Street, Soho, a house which still exists, with its ground floor converted into a French wine shop. There he published his Remarks on Rural Scenery, consisting of etching of cottage and village scenes in the neighbourhood of London, with a preliminary essay on drawing.

In 1800 he was living with his father at 18 May’s Buildings, or the “Rembrandt Head,” as it was styled, in St. Martin’s Lane. In this year the discovery of curious paintings during the alterations to St. Stephen’s Chapel for the enlargement of the House of Commons, attracted Smith’s attention, and, after making careful copies of these relics, he projected his Antiquities of Westminster.

In February 1806, Smith published an etching of the scene on the Thames when Nelson’s remains were brought from Greenwich to Whitehall. He tells us that on showing it to Lady Hamilton she swooned in his arms. The plate is inscribed: “Published February 15, 1806, by John Thomas Smith, at No. 36 Newman Street.” This house remains unaltered.

In 1807 he issued his Antiquities of Westminster, his address appearing in the imprint as 31 Castle Street East, Oxford Street.

In 1810, May’s Buildings reappears in the imprint of his Antient Topography of London, but it may be that this address was not residential. The site of this house is merged in Messrs. Harrison’s printing works.

In 1815–17, Smith lived at No. 4 Chandos Street, Covent Garden, whence he issued his Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London.

In 1816 he succeeded William Alexander as Keeper of the Prints, and it is probable that he soon afterwards took up his residence at No. 22 University Street.[1] He was living here in 1828, when he published, through Henry Colburn, of New Burlington Street, “Nollekens and his Times: comprehending a Life of that celebrated Sculptor; and Memoirs of Several Contemporary Artists, from the time of Roubiliac, Hogarth, and Reynolds, to that of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Blake.” This, his most ambitious work, must be noticed more particularly because of its bearing on Smith’s life and character. Mr. Gosse, who has edited it, with the addition of a graceful essay on Georgian Sculpture, describes it as “perhaps the most candid biography ever published in the English language.” In its pages Smith exposes the domestic privacies and miserly habits of the sculptor and his wife. There are pages of sordid gossip which a dismissed charwoman might probably have found unacceptable to her cronies and supporters. Yet the book cannot be described as venomous. It is cheerily and unscrupulously candid, and this even in the matter of the author’s own disappointment. Nollekens, he assures us, had again and again given him reason to believe that he would be handsomely remembered in his will. “That you may depend upon, Tom,” were his words. It is easy to see that Smith may have come to expect this as the bright event of his later years. His Museum appointment had lifted him out of drudgery, and the promised legacy may have presented itself to him as the final deliverance from care. Nollekens had been kind to him as a boy, and had remained his friend through life. He was a widower, childless, and enormously rich. No artist had known better how to make art profitable. His purchases of antiques in Rome had been most prudent; so, also, his investments. As a sculptor of portrait busts he stood alone, and in his long working life he had “chopped out” the heads of many hundreds of wealthy and illustrious persons. When he died in April 1823, no one was surprised that his estate was declared to be of the value of £300,000. But very little of it went to “Tom,” who, to his intense chagrin, received a bare hundred pounds as one of the three executors.

Five years later, Smith brought out his hit-back biography. Its general veracity cannot be doubted. It is a veracity sharpened, not deflected, by malice. But it is clear that Smith found other satisfactions in writing the book than that of exposing the weaknesses of his old friend. He enjoyed the long and minute chronicle of life in Mortimer Street and in the studios and galleries he had frequented. Nollekens comes and goes in a world of gossip about London, art, and people. True, at any moment a mischievous gust may blow aside the veils to show us Mrs. Nollekens, in second-hand finery, beating down the price of a new broom or a chicken with cunning affability, or the sculptor pocketing nutmegs at the Royal Academy dinners to be added to the Mortimer Street larder. If you protest against these and worse freedoms, you are grateful for the hundred little touches of locality and custom that accompany them. The daily life of the eighteenth century is before you: the parlour, the street, the print shop.

Of Smith’s reign in the Print Room not much can be gathered. He was much liked and respected by those who consulted him in his department. We are told that he was kind to young artists of promise, and gently candid to those of no promise. His recollections and anecdotes were the delight of his visitors, one of whom has left us a racy specimen of his flow of humour and gossip. I refer to the following passage of Boswellian reminiscence, appended to the second and third edition, of the Rainy Day.

“His two old friends, Mr. Packer, who had been a partner in Combe’s brewery, and Colonel Phillips, who had accompanied Captain Cooke in one of his voyages round the world, were constant attendants in the Print Room, and contributed towards the general amusement. Of the former of these gentlemen, who died in 1828, at the advanced age of ninety, Mr. Smith used to tell a remarkable story, which we are rather surprised not to find recorded in his Reminiscences. It was our fortune to be the first to communicate to Mr. Smith the fact of his old friend’s decease, and that he had bequeathed to him a legacy of £100. ‘Ah, Sir!’ he said, in a very solemn manner, after a long pause, ‘poor fellow, he pined to death on account of a rash promise of marriage he had made.’ We humbly ventured to express our doubts, having seen him not long before looking not only very un-Romeo like, but very hale and hearty; and besides, we begged to suggest that other reasons might be given for the decease of a respectable gentleman of ninety. ‘No, Sir,’ said Mr. Smith; ‘what I tell you is the fact, and sit ye down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story. Many years ago, when Mr. Packer was a young man employed in the brew-house in which he afterwards became a partner, he courted, and promised marriage to, a worthy young woman in his own sphere of life. But, as his circumstances improved, he raised his ideas, and, not to make a long story of it, married another woman with a good deal of money. The injured fair one was indignant, but, as she had no written promise to show, was, after some violent scenes, obliged to put up with a verbal assurance that she should be the next Mrs. Packer. After a few years the first Mrs. P. died, and she then claimed the fulfilment of his promise, but was again deceived in the same way, and obliged to put up with a similar pledge. A second time he became a widower, and a third time he deceived his unfortunate first love, who, indignant and furious beyond measure, threatened all sorts of violent proceedings. To pacify her, Mr. P. gave her a written promise that, if a widower, he would marry her when he attained the age of one hundred years! Now he had lost his last wife some time since, and every time he came to see me at the Museum, he fretted and fumed because he should be obliged to marry that awful woman at last. This could not go on long, and, as you tell me, he has just dropped off. If it hadn’t been for this, he would have lived as long as Old Parr. And now,’ finished Mr. Smith, with the utmost solemnity, ‘let this be a warning to you. Don’t make rash promises to women; but if you will do so, don’t make them in writing.’ ”

Had John Thomas Smith been granted the scriptural span of life, he might have read the Pickwick Papers. But the implacable call came in March 1833, and he left various enterprises unfinished. He had collected the materials for a gossipping history of Covent Garden; these have never been edited. The well-known Antiquarian Rambles in the Streets of London, published in 1846, originated in Smith’s notes, but four-fifths of the book was certainly written by its editor, Dr. Charles Mackay.

The book from which Smith has his sobriquet was published in 1845. A Book for a Rainy Day places its author in that line of London’s watchful lovers which began with John Stow and has not ended with Sir Walter Besant. Now, when London’s streets are changing as they have not changed since the Great Fire, he lies in that bare field of the dead behind the Bayswater Road, where, on the grave of a greater writer, you read the words, “Alas! poor Yorick.”

W. W.