Reuben Moulthrop (1763–1814) was an early American artist based in East Haven, Connecticut.
He was only twenty years old when the Revolutionary War ended: although his life spanned from colonial America to the new republic, his career coincided with the early decades of national independence.
Though his earliest documented works, the portraits of Sarah and Job Perit in the Metropolitan Museum, date from 1790, earlier works, such as the portraits of Mary and James Reynolds in the American Folk Art Museum, have been attributed to the artist.
Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College from 1778 to 1795, praised Moulthrop as a "self taught painter" who "pleased with his genius",[2] which suggests how esteemed Moulthrop's work was by the ruling class of the new republic, where there was as yet little art to see.
[3] Moulthrop's work evinces the influence of the Colonial painter John Durand, who had been active in East Haven as well as in New York and Virginia.