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Smybert

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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(or [[Smibert), John]] (1684-1751), Scottish American artist, was born at Edinburgh in 1684, and died in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1751. 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 "Bishop Berkeley and His Family," now in the dining-hall, Yale University, a group of eight figures. 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. A son, Nathaniel Smybert (1734-1756), was born in Boston on the 20th of January 1734, and died there on the 8th of November 1756. He was a pupil.of his father, and dying at the age of twenty-two, left several important canvases, notably a portrait of Dorothy Wendell (in the Collection of Dr John L. Hale, Boston).