Thomas Smith (American painter)

"[1] Smith was also a prominent Boston merchant and slave trader who engaged in the enslavement of Native Americans during King Philip's War.

Many of the trades were recorded by Massachusetts Bay Colony treasurer John Hull, who was charged with handling captured Native Americans from the war.

[3] Because several Thomas Smiths were active in Boston in the late seventeenth century, it is very difficult to identify other contemporary references to persons of that name with the artist.

The monogram T. S. led critics to assume that Smith composed the verses, which describe the speaker's resignation from the world's troubles in order to seek divine solace.

[7] Roger B. Stein finds that 'the poem is the central organizing element, the key to the picture—to its design, to the relationship of its parts to one another, and to its meaning both as individual work and as an artefact within its larger culture'.

Major Thomas Savage (1679) and Mrs Richard Patteshall and Child (1679) are both owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.