Effie Anderson Smith

E.A. Smith ca. 1950

Effie Anderson Smith (September 29, 1869 – April 21, 1955), also known as Mrs. A.Y. Smith, was an early Arizona impressionist painter of desert landscapes, many of Cochise County and the Grand Canyon.

Smith was born in the rural countryside near Nashville, Arkansas, in 1869.^[1] She grew up in Arkansas and served as a school teacher in Hope, Arkansas until 1893, when she left Arkansas for New Mexico, and then Arizona.^[2] She studied at the National Academy of Design in New York, in Philadelphia, and also in California in Oakland (1904),^[3] with May Bradford Shockley in San Francisco (1908),^[3] in Laguna Beach with Anna Althea Hills (1914) and also at the Stickney School in Pasadena with Jean Mannheim^[4] and Richard E. Miller (1916).^[2] Her exhibitions include a show of her Southwest paintings in Corcoran Hall at George Washington University in Washington, DC beginning May 20, 1931. She lived for 56 years in southern Arizona, first in Benson (1895-96), then in Pearce (from 1896 to 1941) and later in Douglas (from 1941 to 1951) in Cochise County, and seasonally in Morenci in Greenlee County at the home of her son Lewis A. Smith.

Smith moved to Prescott, Arizona in 1951, and died there at the Arizona Pioneers' Home in 1955.^[5]

External links

• E.A. Smith Archive
• E.A. Smith bio at Sharlot Hall Museum Women's Memorial Rose Garden site

1. Mitre Press Principal Women of America, p. 112
2. University of Texas Press An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, p. 283
3. Crocker Art Museum Artists in California, 1786–1940, p. 1033
4. Progressive Arizona and the Great Southwest Mrs. A.Y. Smith, Arizona Artist November 1929, p. 13, 33, 34
5. Prescott Evening Courier "Death Claims Effie Smith", 22 April 1955

References

• "Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture" www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net, Effie Anderson Smith (1869-1955)
• "Mrs. A.Y. Smith, Arizona Artist" by Marian Compton, Progressive Arizona and the Great Southwest, VOL. 9, No. 5 (November 1929)
• "Principal Women of America" (1932), Mitre Press, London.
• "Arizona’s Forgotten Artist Mrs. A.Y. Smith" by O. Carroll Arnold, Cochise County Historical Journal, VOL. 19, No. 3 (Fall 1989)
• "An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West" by P.& M.Y. Kovinick (1998), University of Texas Press, Austin.
• "Artists in California, 1786–1940" by E.M. Hughes (2002), Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.
• "The Artists Bluebook" by L.P. Dunbier (2005), AskART Publishing
• "Arizona's Pioneering Women Artists" by Betsy Fahlman & Lonnie Pierson Dunbar (2012), Museum of Northern Arizona.
• "The Arkansas Gazette", Little Rock Arkansas, 5 July 1892, 28 Feb 1893, 28 May 1893, 28 June 1893
• "Prescott Evening Courier", Prescott Arizona, Obituary of 22 April 1955
• www.AskART.com
• 1870 United States Census, Arkansas, Sevier County, Washington Township

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  E.A. Smith with husband Andrew Y. Smith, photographed in a San Francisco Railroad Studio Car photograph made around the time of their wedding (1895)

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  E.A. Smith motoring near her desert home at Pearce, AZ in her Rambler Touring Car, circa 1907

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  E.A. Smith with students in her Douglas, AZ studio (1940s)