John Smibert: Colonial Americas First Portrait Painter

Richard H. Saunders, Author Yale University Press $75 (294p) ISBN 978-0-300-04258-0

Scottish-born colonial American painter John Smibert (1688-1751), who settled in Boston in 1729 after stints in Edinburgh, Florence, Rome and London, brought fresh dynamism to portraiture and landscape. His crisp portraits of upper-middle-class patrons reveal his Scottish bluntness. His most important commission, The Bermuda Group (1731), melded the Renaissance tradition of grand allegory with the commercial conventions of commemorative group portraits. View of Boston (1738), a vast waterfront panorama, is unprecedented in colonial painting. Modest, intensely moral Smibert, a Scottish Presbyterian, faced ethnic prejudice in Boston, a bastion of conservative Congregational beliefs. He had difficulty carving out a career in an opportunistic art world, yet he and his contemporaries laid the groundwork for a colonial art market. Saunders, director of the Middlebury College Museum of Art, enlivens his scholarly monograph with scores of color plates and a complete catalogue of Smibert's works. (Jan.)

Reviewed on: 10/23/1995

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