John Smibert

John Smibert (b. Scotland, 1688-1751)

Although a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, Smibert is remembered today as the first academically trained painter to carve out a career as a portraitist in colonial America. Smibert studied in London at the Great Queen Street Academy of Sir Godfrey Kneller, after which he painted briefly in Scotland. From 1719 to 1722 Smibert was in Italy, painting portraits, making contacts, and studying the great artistic monuments to be found there. From 1722 to 1728 he lived in London and established himself as a portrait painter of some note. In 1728, however, Dean George Berkeley persuaded Smibert to join him on a venture to establish a college in Bermuda, where Smibert would be a professor. Smibert commemorated this venture with his influential group portrait “The Bermuda Group” (1729-31; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.). When the college failed to materialize, Smibert stayed in Boston, where he painted for more than twenty years. He produced portraits of the colony's leading citizens and created a visual record of the pomp and pageantry associated with the late baroque work of the early eighteenth century.

Smibert is unusual for a colonial painter in that his career is clearly documented. His personal account book (Massachusetts Historical Society) records more than four hundred portrait commissions that he received in Italy, England, and America between 1719 and 1746. Smibert's American portraits, rather than showing a radical departure from those painted in London, indicate a slow but persistent transformation of his technique. Like native-trained colonial artists, he suffered from a lack of ongoing exposure to European traditions and knowledgeable criticism. Nevertheless, his career spawned the most impressive body of colonial portraits prior to those of John Singleton Copley.

Benjamin Colman, 1739

Oil on canvas, 49 ¾ x 39 ¾ in. (126.4 x 101 cm)

Inscribed (on letter): To / Mr Benjn Colman / Mercht / in / Bost [on]

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1948.1)

This portrait of the Boston merchant Benjamin Colman, painted in September 1739, was done as Smibert observed the twentieth anniversary of his Boston painting career. In many ways the portrait affirms his dogged allegiance to a late baroque painting style that placed a premium on a rich dark palette, absolute decorum, and methodical modeling of features. It is for these reasons that Colman's portrait recalls earlier images by Smibert, such as “Henry Collins” (1736; Redwood Library and Atheneum, Newport, R.I.). Colman is shown in a well-established merchant pose and attired in a typical, if stylistically conservative, richly colored frock coat and matching waistcoat. The letter in his hand, inscribed To / Mr Benjn Colman / Mercht / in / Bost [on], was one of the visual conventions of the day through which the artist was able to incorporate an informal label in the portrait. Just after the work was painted, Smibert succumbed to a lengthy illness, which effectively curtailed his activity as a painter. “Benjamin Colman” is one of fewer than a dozen portraits that survive from the last years of Smibert’s career.

Colman was born in Boston, October 28, 1710, the tenth child of John Colman and Judith Hobby Colman. John Colman was the elder brother of Reverend Dr. Benjamin Colman of the Church in Brattle Square whose portrait Smibert painted in 1734. Benjamin graduated from Harvard in 1727 and ranked among a handful of families at the pinnacle of Boston society.(1) On March 24, 1736, he married Deborah Oulton, daughter of John and Deborah (Legge) Oulton of Marblehead. On October 12, 1738, she died shortly after having given birth to their second child. Within less than a year Colman married Hannah Pemberton, a daughter of James and Hannah (Penhallow) Pemberton. Smibert had painted her portrait (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in July 1734. Benjamin's portrait was apparently done to commemorate this second marriage. Colman fathered eleven children by his two wives.

Like his father, Benjamin was a merchant. In 1741 he formed a partnership with Nathaniel Sparhawk, and five years later they reached the height of their activity and commercial success, when they supplied the uniforms to the Massachusetts troops assaulting Louisbourg and workmen, supplies, and construction material to the forces that remained there. Their financial success, however, was short lived, and by 1758 Colman's firm declared bankruptcy. Colman’s death on April 20, 1765, his obituary identified him as "formerly a noted Merchant in this Town."(2)

At one point the back of the canvas was inscribed “Henry Davenport was the owner October 1, 1878”.(3) This inscription may now be hidden by a lining canvas. Davenport is said also to have owned Smibert's portrait of Hannah Pemberton.(4)

RHS

Bibliography:

Henry Wilder Foote, “John Smibert, Painter” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950); “The Notebook of John Smibert” (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1969); Richard H. Saunders, “John Smibert: Colonial America's First Portrait Painter” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

NOTES:

1. John Langdon Sibley and Clifford K. Shipton, “Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge Massachusetts”, 17 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1873-?), vol. 8, p. 130.

2. Obituary, “Boston Gazette”, April 29, 1765.

3. Saunders, “John Smibert”, p. 204.

4. Foote, John Smibert, p. 178.