In January 2009, Jeffrey Smith was contacted by David Talbot, founder and former editor-in-chief of one of the first web magazines, Salon.com to work on a new project; a book titled Shadow Knights.
The book tells the story of Winston Churchill’s SOE, an acronym for Special Operations Executive, and the courageous men and women who fought a secret war against the Nazi’s and Adolf Hitler. People like Noor Inayat Khan, Harry Ree, Claus Helberg, Winston Churchill, Hugh Dalton, Brigadier Colin Gubbins, Selwyn Jepson, Jens Poulsson, Knut Haugland, and many more.
The scope of this project was important enough to travel, so Jeffrey decided to take a trip to Paris. He left on June 15th, 2009. Jeffrey traveled to some of the real places where Noor Inayat Khan lived, fought and died for freedom. Gary Kamiya, the writer for Shadow Knights, provided Jeffrey with addresses; places like 40 rue Erlanger in Auteuil, where Noor first arrived, No. 3 Boulevard Richard Wallace, mostly occupied by SS officers, 98 Rue de la Faisanderie, where Noor was arrested, Avenue Foch, 82 and 84, where the Gestapo headquarters were, and finally, Fazal Manzil, the house in Suresnes where Noor grew up as a child.
Jeffrey reflects on the trip as being "strenuous, but I’m glad that I went. Visiting these places gave me the grit to stay focused on a project that would take seven and a half months to complete, to research thousands of photographs from the internet, books, and magazines, to shoot 567 photographs of models and myself, produce 22 photographic comps, many more sketches, 22 full page paintings, and 2 covers for this wonderfully exhausting project. I perused the first chapter for this project on October 12th, 2009, and sent the last illustration on May 28th, 2010."
The Society of Illustrators is pleased to present the entire series of illustrations for Shadow Knights, now part of the Permanent Collection, on display in the Hall of Fame Dining Room from January 3 - 28th, 2012.