John Smibert (24 March 1688 – 2 April 1751) was a Scottish-born painter who was the first academically trained artist to work in British America.

1713-1716, he studied under Godfrey Kneller at the Great Queen Street Academy, then returned to Edinburgh, seeking work as portraitist.

[5] Smibert travelled to Italy from 1719 to 1722 to copy old masters, including some in the collection of Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany,[6] and then settled in London where he worked as a portrait painter from 1722 until 1728.

[12] Smibert painted portraits of Jonathan Edwards and Judge Edmund Quincy (in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), Mrs Smibert, Peter Faneuil and Governor John Endecott (in the Massachusetts Historical Society), John Lovell (Memorial Hall, Harvard University), and probably one of Sir William Pepperrell; and examples of his works are owned by Harvard and Yale Universities, by Bowdoin College, by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and by the New England Historical and Genealogical Society.

This collection, which Richard Saunders has termed "America's first art gallery", provided much of the early artistic education for Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Trumbull.