Joseph Smith (art collector)

[6] Smith's reputation was as a passionate collector[7] of paintings and drawings – both of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters and of living artists – and of manuscripts and books, coins and medals, and engraved gems.

It was Smith's pleasure to issue lavishly-printed books in extremely limited editions, for which he had the services of Giovanni Battista Pasquali, whose press he bankrolled.

[9] A reproduction of Boccaccio's Decamerone from the Pasquali press, guided by Smith, was so exact a facsimile of the rare edition of 1527 that only close examination tells them apart.

[12] Smith's central role in the network of patronage of painters in eighteenth-century Venice, in which he created a market in the taste for vedute, was as the prime facilitator of purchases made by the British aristocrats passing through on the Grand Tour.

In 1762, Smith sold the vast majority of his books, gems, coins, prints, drawings and paintings – including many works by Canaletto – to the young George III for £20,000.

[19] A generous selection of his manuscripts were purchased by Lord Sunderland for the library at Blenheim Palace, which was dispersed in turn during the nineteenth century.

At quite an advanced age, the widowed consul Smith, his wife having died in 1756, married a sister of John Murray, resident at Venice and afterwards British ambassador to Turkey.

His grave was on the Lido, where Goethe, travelling in the late seventeen-eighties, stopped to pay respects: "to him I owe my copy of Palladio, and I offered up a grateful prayer".