Robert Borlase Smart

Robert Borlase Smart RBA ROI RBC RWA SMA, generally known as Borlase Smart (11 February 1881 in Kingsbridge, Devon – 3 November 1947 in St Ives, Cornwall) worked as an art editor and critic on the Western Morning News / Illustrated Western Weekly News from 1901 to 1913, but is principally known as an artist, in which capacity he became a founding member of the St Ives School during the years following his return from the First World War.

Artistic career Borlase Smart studied at Plymouth Art College between 1897 and 1900, made it through the selection process and was hung in the Royal Academy Summer Show. Following this recognition of his abilities he decided to become a professional artist and he gave up his post as a journalist and moved to St Ives, Cornwall in 1913 to study seascape painting. He became a student at the School of Painting which had been established by Julius Olsson in 1895.

During the First World War he served with the Artists Rifles, the Machine Gun Corps, the London Regiment and the Queen’s Regiment. During the conflict he made charcoal and wash drawings which illustrated the conditions that the soldiers endured at the front and the destruction of towns and villages on the Somme, at Arras and at Ypres. These drawings were exhibited at the Fine Art Society in London in 1917, The Harris Galleries in Plymouth and Lanham’s Gallery in St Ives in 1919. In 1916 he met and established a lifelong friendship with Leonard Fuller while they were producing illustrations of the Lewis gun.

In 1919, Smart, now married, moved to St Ives to occupy the Ocean Wave Studio. In the three decades that followed, Smart gained a reputation as a fine painter and an organiser and promoter of the St Ives artistic community.

Borlase Smart published a number of books on the techniques of painting (including 'The Technique of Seascape Painting' , published in 1934), and was a key figure, in the final year of his life, in establishing a permanent home for the St Ives Society of Arts in the Mariners' Church.

He died at home, on 3 November 1947, of a heart attack.