SMITH, Frederic. A CHEST OF VIOLS & OTHER VERSES. 1896. Simpkin & Marshall.
Loosely inserted Obituary Notices for the Author and his brother Sir Mathew Smith, Artist. A few poems relevant to the Franco-Prussian War. £8.00

Product Description
And other verses. The writer of this medley of fugitive verse is conscious of its immaturity and inequality. He wishes to remind the reader that most of it was written in youth, and the remainder in spare moments of a busy life.

Father of Painter Matthew Smith....

Frederic Smith was a cultivated man and an amateur of the
arts. He wrote occasional verse, a collection of which, C A Chest of
Viols', was published in 1896 ; he collected pictures of the kind then
in vogue with northern manufacturers, representing monks fishing
or carousing and similar subjects, by Dendy Sadler and other
painters of popular genre. The principal interest of his leisure hours
was violins, of which he seems to have been an impassioned and
discerning collector. He possessed two or three by Stradivarius, and
his house became a place of pilgrimage for those who shared his
interests. A memorial of his preoccupation with pictures and violins
survives in the form of a painting, Stradivarius in His Studio, which
he commissioned Seymour Lucas to make and which was shown at
Burlington House a few years before the First World War.