John Foster : the earliest American engraver and the first Boston printer / by Samuel Abbott Green. Pub. by the Massachusetts Historical Society at the charge of the Waterston Fund, no. 2.

  • Samuel Abbott Green
Date:
[1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: John Foster : the earliest American engraver and the first Boston printer / by Samuel Abbott Green. Pub. by the Massachusetts Historical Society at the charge of the Waterston Fund, no. 2. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and the aged minister, who died on April 22, 1669. For more than a century there has been in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society an engraved portrait which bears under it the printed legend “ Mr. Richard Mather.” It is of the rudest sort, showing a half-length figure of an old man, and was given to the Society on January 27, 1807, by Arthur Maynard Walter, a descendant of the Puritan minister. The cut is about five inches by six in size, not including the name underneath, and represents Mather holding a pair of very small eye-glasses in his right hand and an open book in his left. The engraving is cut on wood, apparently on the flat side of a board, as the grain of the wood can be detected in the impression. The block was in two pieces ; and the head and shoulders forming the upper part, being too narrow for the lower part, did not fit together by nearly a quarter of an inch. A similar engraving, in which the two parts fit, is owned by the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. Evidently this is a later impression from the same block, as the two parts fit; and furthermore the left arm has been considerably pared off. I have long had a notion that the cut was the work of John Foster; and more than sixteen years ago (March, 1893) ^ broached this theory before the His- torical Society, though at that time I supposed that Foster was a printer first and an engraver afterward, which is just the reverse of what is known to-day. Within a short time the Library of Harvard College has come into the
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