John Smybert

(b Edinburgh, 24 March 1688; d Boston, 2 April 1751). American painter of Scottish birth. From 1702 to 1709 he was apprenticed to a house painter and plasterer in Edinburgh. He set out for London at the end of his apprenticeship, about which time he began recording in a Notebook the events of his life and in succeeding years the details of his travels and records of his painting activities.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

John Smibert (1688-1751), Scottish-born American artist, was a most celebrated painter in the Colonies.

John Smibert was born in Edinburgh, where he was trained as an artisan. Hoping to attain success as a painter, he went to London, working as a coach painter and a copyist. At the age of 28 he became a student at James Thornhill's Great Queen Street Academy. Smibert traveled in Italy from 1717 to 1720, for the grand tour was expected of an aspiring painter, and then reestablished himself in London, where he was regarded as no more than a competent painter.

In 1729 Smibert sailed for America with Dean (later Bishop) George Berkeley, who had organized a movement to establish a college in Bermuda "for converting the Indians to Christianity." Smibert had hoped that in America, where there were no European-trained painters, he would be successful. Berkeley's party landed at Newport, R.I.; as the plan for the college did not materialize, Smibert went to Boston, where he expected to find patrons.

Smibert's Dean George Berkeley with His Family and Friends (1729) was the most elaborate and complex painting done in New England to that time. New England portraits usually contained one, two, or at most three sitters, who were shown with few if any accessories. In Smibert's painting, eight sitters, disposed in front of a landscape, are arranged about a table covered with a Turkey-work cloth on which books are placed. Here he introduced a new sophistication and an almost baroque complexity into American art. The gestures of the figures are awkward, and at times the drawing is uncertain, but the faces are rendered honestly, rather than with the facile flattery then characteristic of most English painting.

The homespun, direct quality that Smibert quickly adopted was well received by Bostonians. Some of his portraits, such as that of Nathaniel Byfield (1730), have qualities approaching caricature; others reveal sympathetic psychological penetration. Smibert may also have painted landscapes, for he wrote of working "with somethings in a landskip way." But except for the backgrounds in some of the portraits, including the Berkeley group and the portrait of Jane Clark (ca. 1740), no landscapes survive.

Smibert was one of the first painters in the Colonies to enjoy a status beyond that of an artisan. As such, he set the tone for later painters. He married well; he held civil offices; and he was able to support himself as a settled citizen rather than as an itinerant artist, as was then common. He also submitted some of the first designs for Faneuil Hall in Boston. His son Nathaniel (1734-1756) was also a painter.

Further Reading

The best and most complete study of Smibert is Henry Wilder Foote, John Smibert, Painter (1950), which contains a descriptive catalog of the portraits.

Additional Sources

Saunders, Richard H., John Smibert: colonial America's first portrait painter, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

"Dean Berkely and His Entourage" (c. 1729)

John Smybert (or Smibert) (1688 - 1751), Scottish American artist, was born in Edinburgh and died in Boston, Massachusetts.

He studied under Sir James Thornhill, and in 1728 accompanied Bishop Berkeley to America, with the intention of becoming professor of fine arts in the college which Berkeley was planning to found in Bermuda. The college, however, was never established, and Smybert settled in Boston, where he married in 1730.

In 1731 he painted "Dean George Berkeley and His Family," also called "The Bermuda group", now in the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, a group of eight figures; it is maintained that the person furthest to the left is actually the artist himself. He painted portraits of Jonathan Edwards and Judge Edmund Quincy (in the Boston Art Museum), Mrs Smybert, Peter Faneuil and Governor John Endecott (in the Massachusetts Historical Society), John Lovell (Memorial Hall, Harvard University), and probably one of Sir William Pepperrell; and examples of his works are owned by Harvard and Yale Universities, by Bowdoin College, by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and by the New England Historical and Genealogical Society.

Portrait of Edmund Quincy, attributed to John Smybert

Plaque at Granary Burying Ground in Boston commemorating Smybert

Between 1740-42, he served as architect for the original Faneuil Hall, which he designed in the style of an English country market. The hall burned down in 1761 but was restored, and then in 1806 greatly expanded and modified by Charles Bulfinch.

His son Nathaniel was also a painter. Smybert lies in an unmarked grave in the Granary Burying Ground in Boston.

References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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