ABOUT NED SMITH
EARLY YEARS
E. Stanley “Ned” Smith was born on October 9, 1919, in Millersburg, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Susquehanna River north of Harrisburg. A self-trained artist and naturalist, he spent a 46-year career creating thousands of remarkably accurate wildlife drawings and paintings for books, magazines, and other publications, as well as dozens of limited-edition prints.
Ned grew up in a household deeply connected to the natural world. His mother was an avid birder, and his father—manager of a local shoe factory—had a strong interest in botany. Blending his love of natural history with a natural talent for art, Ned was already producing high-quality wildlife illustrations by the time he graduated from high school in the 1930s. After graduation, he began working not as an artist but as a lathe operator in a machine shop, providing a steady income for himself and his new wife and childhood sweetheart, Marie Reynolds.
Even as he worked full-time, Ned continued to draw and paint, spending every spare moment in the field—a lifelong habit. He refined his skills both as an observer of wildlife and as one of the region’s finest naturalists. In 1939 he made his first commercial sale: a cover painting for Pennsylvania Angler magazine. Soon afterward, he accepted a full-time illustration position with Samworth Publishing. Ned and Marie spent a year living on the Samworth estate in South Carolina while he illustrated the company’s hunting and firearms books.
Photo Credit: S. Wingard
PA GAME COMMISSION & GONE FOR THE DAY
After returning to Pennsylvania, Ned became the staff illustrator for the Pennsylvania Game Commission—the start of a lifelong association with the state’s wildlife agency. Over the years he created nearly 120 cover paintings for Pennsylvania Game News, the agency’s magazine. In the 1960s he launched a monthly column he called Gone for the Day, which quickly became a favorite among readers.
Drawn from his extensive field journals and sketchbooks, the column was deceptively simple: diary-style reflections on the animals and plants he encountered, illustrated in his now-distinctive style with crisp pen-and-ink drawings and larger pencil and gouache renderings on toned paper. The column ran for four years and was republished in book form in 1971. It remains in print today as a classic of Pennsylvania nature writing.
REPUTATION AS AN ARTIST GROWS
With Marie serving as both business partner and companion in birding, camping, and fishing—and with his Game Commission work providing a strong platform—Ned’s reputation expanded rapidly. In 1953 he left the agency to become a full-time freelance artist, though the Commission remained a major client.
His freelance work included long-running columns, articles, and illustrations for Sports Afield, National Wildlife, Pennsylvania Angler, South Carolina Wildlife, National Geographic, and other magazines. Over his career he illustrated 14 books, including Hal Harrison’s Peterson Field Guide to Birds’ Nests. In 1983 he was commissioned to create Pennsylvania’s first state duck stamp, and he produced a second design two years later.
MORE THAN A WILDLIFE ARTIST
Ned was far more than a wildlife illustrator. He was a skilled photographer and a gifted writer with an informal, conversational tone. He was also a musician and an inventor. He and Marie were avid amateur archaeologists as well, once excavating a Native American encampment on a Susquehanna River island exposed by the floods of Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972. Many of their finds are now held by the State Museum in Harrisburg.
FINE ART PRINTS
In the late 1970s, Ned entered the growing field of fine art prints, initially publishing his own work before partnering with Sportsman Specialties, a gallery and publisher in western Pennsylvania. In the last five years of his life, he created a series of especially popular prints from large acrylic and oil paintings, including masterworks such as Waiting for Dusk, depicting a pair of red foxes on a late-winter evening, and A Little Bit Cautious, showing a black bear giving a porcupine a respectful distance.
During this period he also produced several of the Game Commission’s “Working Together for Wildlife” prints, including Dutch Country Bluebirds, one of his most beloved pieces, as well as fundraising prints for the National Wild Turkey Federation, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, and other organizations.
LEGACY
Ned battled heart disease for many years. In the spring of 1985, while working in the garden of his Millersburg home, he died of a heart attack at age 65. Since then, the value of his work has continued to rise—original paintings now exceed $60,000, and some prints resell for more than $5,000.
Marie’s early wish to find a permanent home for her extensive collection of Ned’s art eventually led to the idea of creating the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art. The Center uses Ned’s many overlapping interests and talents to bridge the worlds of art and natural science. Marie passed away unexpectedly in January 2002, less than two weeks before Pennsylvania Governor Mark Schweiker presented a $2 million check toward construction of the facility that would fulfill her dream.
NED SMITH CENTER STAFF
