Lewis Smith

1907-1998 · Ohio, USA

He rode the railways of America with a free pass and drew everything: locomotives, lady athletes, lunch counters, all on grocery bags and cracker boxes, and showed nobody.

The life

Smith was born in Ohio in 1907 and spent his life there, an eccentric who never exhibited his art and left behind a trove of pictures and journals discovered only after his death in 1998. A railroad pass let him travel far beyond the family farm, and he compulsively documented what he saw, from the specific trains he began recording in the 1920s, compiling a private history of the railways with photographs collected from railway workers, to the women’s athletic events he followed around the country. His motto: “I want the whole world to be in my head and still wear my own hat.”

The work

Ink, pencil and crayon on the humblest supports going: women athletes in carnival-bright scenes on brown grocery-bag paper, diner interiors with their signs, specials and coffee cups drawn on flattened Saltine cracker boxes, and trains that drift from meticulous record into fantasy, like his tractors drawn from memory. His work is held by the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

Why we love them

The great secret documentarian of ordinary America. He archived a whole century on packaging and never once asked for an audience.

Go deeper

• Lewis Smith at the Outsider Art Fair
• Lewis Smith on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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