George Smith's reputation reached far enough beyond England that continental audiences came to know him as the "British Gessner," a comparison to the celebrated Swiss idyllic poet and painter Salomon Gessner that reflects the genuinely wide appeal of Smith's idealised pastoral landscapes during the 1760s and 1770s. Born in Chichester in 1713 or 1714, the second of three artist sons of a tradesman and Baptist minister, William Smith, Smith was initially apprenticed to a cooper before choosing to follow his eldest brother William into painting, accompanying him to Gloucester and working for some years chiefly as a portrait painter before returning to his native city.
Back in Chichester, and under the patronage of the Duke of Richmond, Smith settled into landscape painting proper, developing an idealised, pastoral treatment of the Sussex and English countryside modelled closely on Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, a style that appealed strongly to mid-eighteenth-century English taste. Together with his younger brother John, his frequent collaborator, and their elder brother William, he formed part of what became known as the Smith Brothers of Chichester, a genuinely notable provincial artistic dynasty whose landscapes and still lifes achieved national recognition through prints sold in London alongside engravings after Reynolds and Gainsborough; a contemporary 1762 review of the Society of Arts exhibition judged their superiority as landscape painters "so incontestably visible... that to declare my Opinion in this matter is quite unnecessary." George won the Society of Arts landscape premium in 1760, 1761 and 1763, exhibited with the Free Society of Artists until 1774, and showed four landscapes at the Royal Academy that same year, alongside publishing a volume of his own pastoral poetry in 1770 and, with John, a set of fifty-three etchings and engravings after their own and other masters' work. He died in Chichester in 1776, his critical standing already at its height, though it fell into relative obscurity after his death before a modern reassessment restored the Smith brothers' reputation as genuine pioneers of native English landscape painting.
The painting by George Smith of Chichester held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of a return from market, exemplifies precisely the idealised rural genre subject matter for which he was so widely admired in his own lifetime, and situates him within a genuinely important eighteenth-century provincial school that helped establish landscape as a serious native British genre at a time when it was still often outsourced to visiting foreign artists.