Sarah Stone was the first female British painter of birds and animals to achieve professional recognition. Little is known of S. Stone’s training but it is most likely that she received practical training from her father James Stone (dates unknown), a fan painter. From her masterfully executed watercolours, it is evident that she was trained in the use of both opaque and transparent pigments. Her surviving drawings and watercolours include a wide range of ethnographic material, mammals, reptiles, birds, fossils and shells. As most of the actual specimens she recorded have not survived, her drawings are a vital record of ethnographic and natural history collections in Britain during the 18^th century.
S. Stone was one of the most prolific of the artists involved in documenting a collection of objects gathered during the voyages of Captain James Cook. The artist worked for the collector Sir Ashton Lever at the Holophuscian or Leverian Museum, located in the former royal palace at Leicester House in London. When a selection of the drawings A. Lever commissioned from S. Stone was exhibited in 1784, a series of newspaper advertisements placed by A. Lever in The Morning Post and Daily Observer named and praised the artist directly, mentioning “a large Room of Transparent Drawings from the most curious specimens in the collection, consisting of above one thousand different articles, executed by Miss Stone, a young lady who is allowed by all Artists to have succeeded in the effort beyond imagination”.

Clearly, her reputation was known by the time she was in her early 20s. In addition to working for Lever and the later owner of the Leverian collections for almost thirty years, S. Stone also drew and painted items from other local private collections and for the British Museum. Between 1789 and 1798, S. Stone made drawings for three natural history book publications, with her accurate drawings engraved by other artists in John White’s Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales… (1790), George Shaw’s Museum Leverian… (1792) and Thomas Pennant’s A View of Hindoostan (1798–1800).

S. Stone exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1781, 1785 and 1786. She also exhibited paintings of birds at the Society of Artists in 1791. She married naval officer John Langdale Smith on 8 September 1789, and began signing her work “Sarah Smith”, presumably soon afterwards. She continued to work with some periods of noted inactivity, often coinciding with her husband’s stints at sea, until at least 1806, the last year in which she signed any work.  More than 900 of her watercolour paintings exist in both private and public collections, including the British Museum, London; the National Library of Australia, Canberra; and the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii.