Smith-Hald was a Norwegian landscape painter.
From 1865 to 1870 he attended the Royal drawing school (established in 1816) in the capital Christiania and Johan Fredrik Eckersberg (1822-1870) painting school in border (established in 1859).
From 1871 to 1873 he moved to Karlsruhe in Germany and taught at Hans Gude (1825-1903) who had acceded there in 1864.
From 1873 to 1878 he was at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf where Gude had been from 1841. But he preferred Paris and moved there in 1878, and became Norway's most famous painter in Europe at the time.
He received various foreign medals. In the 1890s the family moved to Bergen, but moved abroad again in 1895, and lived partly in Belgian Antwerp from 1898. Frithjof traveled to Minnesota autumn of 1902 with his exhibition, and died of pneumonia in Chicago 1903.
He was the son of Registrar Christian Frederick Smith and Karen Christine Hald. Therefore surname Smith-Hald.
Although he married Anna Ida Østrup Dahl (1854-1944) who was the sister of landscape painter Hans Dahl (1849-1937). They became the parents of Frithjof Smith-Hald (1879-1928) and painter Bjorn Smith-Hald ( 1883-1964). Daughter Helga Smith-Hald (born 1877) was a composer and married in Paris in 1909 by the American George Edward Gouraud (1842-1912).