John Smith (engraver, born 1652)

Life

He was born at Daventry, Northamptonshire, about 1652. He was articled to a painter named Tillet in London, and studied mezzotint engraving under Isaac Beckett and Jan van der Vaardt. He became the favourite engraver of Sir Godfrey Kneller, whose paintings he extensively reproduced, and in whose house he is said to have lived for some time.

On giving up business he retired to Northamptonshire, where he died on 17 January 1742 at the age of ninety. He was buried in the churchyard of St Peter's, Northampton, where there was a tablet to his memory and that of his wife Sarah, who died in 1717.

Works

Smith's plates numbered about five hundred, and of those nearly three hundred were portraits of notable men and women of the period between the reigns of Charles II and George II, from pictures by Peter Lely, Kneller, Willem Wissing, Michael Dahl, John Riley, John Closterman, Edward Gibson, Thomas Murray, and others. The remainder are sacred, mythological, and genre subjects after Titian, Correggio, Parmigianino, Carlo Maratti, Godfried Schalcken, Egbert van Heemskerck, Marcellus Laroon and others. Until 1700 his plates were mostly published by Edward Cooper, but about that date he established himself as a printseller at the Lyon and Crown in Covent Garden; he published his own works and also reissued many of those by Beckett, Bernard Lens, Williams, and others, retouching them and erasing the original engravers' names. Smith's latest print appears to have been the portrait of the youthful Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, after Joseph Highmore, dated 1729.

The bulk of his copperplates eventually came into the hands of John Boydell, who reprinted them in large numbers. A portrait of John Smith, in which he appears holding his engraving of Kneller, was painted and presented to him by the artist in 1696, and he executed a print from it in 1716; it was also engraved by Samuel Freeman for Horace Walpole's Anecdotes. The original went to the National Portrait Gallery, London.