Robert Smirke (painter)

Robert Smirke RA (15 April 1753 – 5 January 1845) was an English painter and illustrator, specialising in small paintings showing subjects taken from literature.

In 1786 he exhibited Narcissus and The Lady and Sabrina ( a subject from Milton's Comus) at the Royal Academy; these were followed by many works, usually small in size, illustrative of the English poets, especially James Thomson.

Smirke is generally accepted as the author in 1815–16 of a series of satirical "Catalogues Raisonnés", which savagely lampooned the great and the good of British art patronage.

Smirke died at 3 Osnaburgh Terrace, Regent's Park, London, on 5 January 1845, aged 92, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

He designed illustrations for the Bible, The Picturesque Beauties of Shakespeare (1783), Johnson's Rasselas (1805), Gil Blas (1809), the Arabian Nights (1811), Adventures of Hunchback (1814), Don Quixote, (translated by his daughter, Mary Smirke, 1818), and various British poets, especially James Thomson.