Smibert, John (Scotland, 1688–1751, active in the United States)

John Smibert divided his early career between Edinburgh, his birthplace, and London, where he variously studied art, worked as a plasterer, painted houses and coaches, and eventually set up as a portrait painter and copyist. He arrived in Italy in 1717, copied master paintings in Florence and Rome for his patron Cosimo III de' Medici, and then returned to London. By 1722 he had a studio there and was considered a leading portraitist. Smibert arrived in the American colonies in 1728, attracted by climate, opportunity, and the promise of employment in a visionary utopian colony to be established in the Bermudas. It failed to materialize, but he remained, the first fully trained artist in the colonies. He established a highly successful portrait practice in Boston. Smibert's painting of then-Major Paul Mascarene is in the grand tradition of European military portraiture and includes the customary although anachronistic suit of armor. Smibert's skill in showing the play of light on its surface, as well as the firm plasticity of Mascarene's figure, marks a notable stylistic advance over the flatness typical of earlier New England portraits. Smibert composed beneath Mascarene's extended hand a still life of map and drafting instruments, which refer to the Major's coastal survey of Nova Scotia, Smibert was one of the few early colonial artists who sometimes painted actual landscapes as backgrounds to his portraits, rather than imaginary scenes. However, whether or not the fortification depicted here actually existed is not known.