Joseph Lindon Smith

Two of George and his wife Mary (1870–1950) Reisner’s closest friends were the American painter, Joseph Lindon Smith (1863–1950), and his wife Corinna (1876–1965), who was fluent in Arabic. After training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in Paris at the Académie Julian, Smith abandoned being a portraitist and found his calling in painting ancient sites and monuments. Although Smith traveled to—and painted—sites all over the Old and New Worlds over a long career, he returned almost every year to Egypt, joining Reisner at the “Harvard Camp” dig house headquarters west of the famous Giza Pyramids, or wherever Reisner happened to be excavating in Egypt or Sudan. Reisner told him: “You’ve accomplished the impossible. Each painting is an archaeological record correct in details, but beautiful as a picture.” These images became an important type of documentation, since back then there was no color photography in archaeology.