ABSTRACT
In any event, John Smibert's arrival hastened the spread of aristocratic styles throughout the colonies after 1725, and he may be considered a major symbol of colonial artistic desires to emulate English habits, even as the colonies were developing their own political traditions and economic prerogatives. Smibert's marriage in 1730 to the daughter of a physician and schoolmaster gave him an elevated social status, which earlier colonial artists had not had. Perhaps it also provided access to the calm, contained, and rational universe of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which is revealed in Smibert's serene and refined portraits of leading colonial officials, merchants, and clergymen. By the middle of the eighteenth century, several schools and individual carvers had become well known. The Joseph Tapping Stone, 1678, roughly contemporary with the earliest surviving Puritan paintings, is among the more elaborate of its time. The centrally placed death's head commonly appeared on Boston gravestones of the period.
