illustration, 188 Smit was born in
Lisse. He also did the lithography for his friend
Joseph Wolf's
Zoological Sketches, as well as
Daniel Giraud Elliot's monographs on the
Phasianidae and
Paradisaeidae. Beginning in the 1870s, he worked on the
Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum (1874–1898, edited by
Richard Bowdler Sharpe), and later on
Lord Lilford's
Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands. Smit contributed illustrations to
John Gould's books on birds of different parts of the world, along with leading
Victorian era wildlife artists including Wolf,
Edward Lear,
William Hart,
Henry Constantine Richter and
J.G. Keulemans. He also provided many of the illustrations of dinosaurs and other fossil creatures for the popular book
Extinct Monsters (1892) by
Henry Neville Hutchinson. He died in his home on Cobden Hill,
Radlett,
Hertfordshire, United Kingdom on 4 November 1929 at age 93. ==Family==