Thomas Smith
1650
—
1691
American artist and mariner (1650-1691)
Thomas Smith was an artist, sailor and slave trader in colonial New England. Smith is best known for the self-portrait that he painted c. 1680, which according to the Worcester Art Museum, is "the only seventeenth-century New England portrait by an identified artist and the earliest extant American self-portrait." Smith was also a prominent Boston merchant and slave trader who engaged in the enslavement of Native Americans during King Philip's War.