J. Andre Smith

He was born in Hong Kong, lived a few years in Hamburg, Germany as a child after his father died, and moved with his mother and family to New York City.

He attended schools and college in New York State, getting an undergraduate and graduate degree in architecture from Cornell University.

He eventually retired to Florida, where he established his Research Studio, now the Art and History Museums Maitland, which is now designated as a National Historic Landmark.

Jules Andre Smith, was born to American parents in Hong Kong in 1880, when the city was under British colonial rule.

According to Smith, his father was a shipbuilder who was lost at sea, after which his mother relocated the family first to Hamburg, Germany; then to New York City in 1889; and finally to the small town of Stony Creek, outside New Haven along the Connecticut coast, where they settled.

He was soon promoted to captain and called to active duty as an artist assigned to the American Camouflage Corps, 40th Engineers, under the command of Aymar Embury, the celebrated New York architect, who organized a unit of eight professional artists to document the activities of the American Expeditionary Force in France, the same unit in which fellow architect-artist Louis Conrad Rosenberg served.

His wartime experiences served as the basis of In France with the American Expeditionary Forces, a collection of 100 of his field sketches and drawings.

Smith remained in New York practicing architecture and continuing to make fine art drawings and prints until 1924, when he returned to his Stony Creek, Connecticut home.

It was during this period that the expositional Beaux Arts treatment that characterized his pre-war prints gradually became more stylized and expressive.

The two men drove down the Eastern Seaboard intending to acquire property in South Florida on which they would build a residential studio.

Through a series of fortuitous meetings and introductions Smith met Mrs. Mary Louise Curtis Bok, a Philadelphia plilanthropist, and it was she who provided the financing to buy six acres of land in Lake Maitland, as well as begin the first stages of construction that would result in The Research Center, Smith's visionary artist colony.

This book, which consists of text, 37 drawings, and related poems depicts a disorderly world of exaggerated conflict, contrast, and surrealist juxtapositions, and owes much to the wordless novels of Frans Masereel (1889–1972) and Lynd Ward (1905–1985), whose work Smith may well have seen, and whose disillusioned view of militarized, industrial society he certainly shared.

Today, the largest and most significant archive of his personal papers, correspondence, and estate artwork is held by the Art and History Museums Maitland.