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ards of his day, which were not high, since he lived just before
the
brilliant flowering of English art at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury. He was Scotch by birth, born in Edinburgh, in 1684, and in
his youth was apprenticed to a house painter and plasterer; but a
taste for drawing made him leave the more mechanical branch of
his profession and come to London, where he supported life by
coach-painting and copying old pictures. He increased his skill by
studying in the Academy of Sir James Thornhill, who was then the
leading native artist in England and almost the first to receive any
public recognition. Sir James was a man of good birth, which un-
doubtedly helped him to success, and he decorated, at so much a
square yard, staircases, galleries, and ceilings, including the dome
of
St. Paul's, in the style of Verrio and the foreigners that he
succeeded.
He was wealthy and maintained his Academy at his own expense.
Smybert had there, for a fellow-student, Hogarth, with whom the
series of great English portrait painters begins, and who clandes-
tinely married Thornhill's daughter.
After his coach-painting days, Smybert went, in 1717, to Italy
and
on his return set up as portrait painter with success and was particu-
larly patronized by the " Virtuosi " of London, a society of amateurs
of the fine arts, containing men of some celebrity like John Wooten,
Thomas Gibson, and George Vertue. And he was also well known
to Horace Walpole, from whose anecdotes of painting we get most
of our knowledge of Smybert before he sailed for America, and who
regarded his departure for an uncivilized country, just when fortune
began to smile on him, with the amused superiority of a man of the
world and a dilettante. " Smybert," he says, " was a silent and
modest man who abhorred finesse in his profession and was en-
chanted with a plan which he thought promised tranquillity and an
honest subsistence in a healthy and elysian climate, and in spite of
remonstrances engaged with the Dean."
His most important work and his best is the picture of
Bishop
Berkeley and his family, now in the Dining Hall, Yale University,
a group containing eight figures suggesting the one described in
the Vicar of Wakefield
whose dimensions rendered it impossible
to enter the house and relegated it to the yard. It is well if
somewhat stiffly arranged, the painting is dry and hard, and the
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