John Foster (1648 – September 9, 1681) was an early American woodcut printmaker and letterpress printer who operated a printing shop in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when the colony was still in its infancy. He is credited with printing the first image in British colonial America, from a woodcut he carved of the Puritan minister Richard Mather. He also printed the first map in the colonies, also from a woodcut that he carved. Foster graduated from Harvard University, but was a self-taught pioneer in American printmaking in woodcut, and also learned the art of typography from the Boston printer Marmaduke Johnson. He subsequently printed many works by prominent religious figures of the day in Massachusetts, and for a few years printed and published an annual almanac. His woodcuts were also used for the printing of official seals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony used by the provincial government.
Contents
Early life
Foster was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, which later became part of South Boston. He was the second son and fourth child of Hopestill and Mary (Bates) Foster. He was baptized in Dorchester on December 10, 1648, by the Puritan minister Richard Mather, who arrived in the British colonies in 1635. Foster's father was a brewer and a member of the Massachusetts General Court. Foster attended Harvard College and graduated in the class of 1667 with a bachelor's degree, some two years after he began teaching English, Latin, and writing in his hometown. His graduation class contained only seven students. After graduation he pursued a post-graduate course, but according to Harvard's records did not complete the course, as his name does not appear in their Quinquennial Catalogue. In October 1669, Foster replaced Rev. Hope Atherton, also a graduate of Harvard College as the teacher at the school in Dorchester, receiving a salary of £25 a year, later raised to £30 a year. He taught at Dorchester until late in 1674.
Investigations by Samuel Green, once the official printer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reveals that Foster had possessed a natural talent for drawing and sketching, and early in life was drawn to the art of wood-engraving. After securing the necessary tools, he spent his leisure hours in learning the art. The crudeness of his work indicates that he was probably self-taught, although he may have been influenced by John Hull, the mint-master, and Edward Budd, a prominent carver who was in Boston as early as 1665.
Printing career
Few details are known of Foster's career as a printer, which is often the case for mid-seventeenth-century printers. According to Foster's biographer, Samuel Abbott Green, it is difficult to write an extensive biography of his personal and professional life. Foster was the first printmaker to emerge in British colonial America and is considered to be a pioneer and innovator in this art. During Foster's time, the various crafts and trades were in their early development in colonial America and had not been specialized, as there was little time to devote to these things over the priorities of maintaining a comfortable life in the virgin frontier.
Foster "took up engraving as an avocation" (meaning printmaking) in 1671 and became the earliest printmaker in colonial America. After Richard Mather died, his son, Increase Mather, wrote a biography of Richard's life, printed and published by Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson in Cambridge in 1670, whose front piece bore an imprint from Foster's wood-cut of Mather. It is considered the first printed image created in the American colonies.
A few years later, he purchased the printshop of Marmaduke Johnson from his widow which Johnson had established shortly before his death in 1674. Foster had learned the finer arts of typography and use of the printing press from Johnson. Like Johnson, Foster was also required to obtain a license to open and operate a printing office in Boston. Early the following year, Foster assumed control of Marmaduke's printing establishment and commenced printing operations "over against the Sign of the Dove," and became the premier and pioneering printer of Boston. Also that year, Foster began publishing an annual almanac which contained both science and the Zodiac with "An Almanack of Cœlestial Motions for the Year of the Christian Epocha", with year date noted in each yearly issue, with the first publication issued in 1675 and its last appearing in 1681, the year of Foster's early death. His almanacks contain a number of astrological and other imprints made from his woodcuts. Print historian Richard Holman explains that Foster's frustration with the bad quality of Cambridge printer Samuel Green on Foster's almanac during 1675 prompted him to give it a try as printer. Holman adds "perhaps Foster looked at the title page and decided that a bright Harvard man could certainly do better."
In 1672, Foster engraved on wood the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal, modeled after the original silver seal which was cut in England, and sent over to Governor Endicott in 1629. Foster's seals were used on official documents, and the colonial laws, including The General Laws and Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony, printed by Samuel Green. Evident in different editions of the laws, the engravings of this seal reveal variations, and suggest that Foster must have cut several separate seals. Foster's woodcuts were frequency used between 1675 and 1678, and appeared on various official documents until the Andros government of 1686. From 1678 on Foster's woodcut appears on many colonial documents indicating that nearly all the official printing contracts went to him after that date." An example of Foster's Massachusetts colonial seal also appears in Increase Mather's work, A brief history of the war with the Indians in New-England, published in 1676.
Selected works printed by Foster
Along with his annual almanacs, Foster printed many religious works authored by various religious figures of his day, including Increase Mather, Leonard Hoar, Samuel Willard and others, some of which are listed below.
The Times of Men are in the Hands of God. A Sermon occasioned by the blowing up of a Vessel with the crew, 1697
George Fox Digged out of his Burrowes, or an offer of Disputation on 14 proposalls, made the last summer, 1672
The wicked Man's Portion. Sermon at the Lecture in Boston, January 18, 1674, on the Execution of Two Men, 1674
The Happiness of a People. Election Sermon at Boston, 1675
A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England, from the first Planting thereof in the Year 1607, to the present Year 1677
Relation of the Troubles which have happened in New-England by Reason of the Indians there, from the year 1614 to the year 1675
An Earnest Exhortation to the Inhabitants of New England to hearken to the Voice of God
Earnest Exhortation to the Inhabitants of New England.
Harmony of the Gospels in the Holy History of the Humiliations and Sufferings of Jesus Christ, 1678.
Several Poems compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of Delight
Confession of Faith owned and assented to by the Synod assembled at Boston in N. E. May 12, 1680
Final days and legacy
After fighting tuberculosis for seven months, Foster died of tuberculosis in 1681 on September 9, 1681, at the relatively young age of thirty-three, leaving Boston without a printer. Samuel Sewall, though not a printer but a magistrate, a well respected man of Boston was recommended by the General Court to manage and continue printing operations where Foster left off. Foster is buried in the Dorchester North Burying Ground, not far from Richard Mather's grave.
In 1879 Boston historian John Allen Lewis said of Foster:
After a while I came to look on Foster as one of the great men of that great age, — a scholar, a thinker, a printer, engraver, chemist, — a man worthy of the love, friendship, and admiration of the Mathers. Had Foster lived to that age that Franklin reached, Franklin might have been called a 'second Foster.'
While Foster's body was "weak & languishing", while still of sound mind, he made out his last will and signed it on July 18, 1681. In it he had directed that his printing-press and wares at his shop in Boston be sold to pay off his debts, his funeral expenses, and to provide twenty or thirty shillings "to pay for a pair of handsome Gravestones." He bequeathed his house in Dorchester to his widowed mother, who was his sole executor. The value of his estate at the time of his death amounted to a little over a hundred pounds.
In Foster's will, he left the greater portion of his estate to his mother and his siblings, but set aside 20 shillings each (£1) for his good friends, the ministers John Eliot and Increase and Cotton Mather. Historians believe that Foster also worked as a medical doctor, which was not uncommon for a man of Foster's education at a time when there were few doctors in the early years of colonial America.
A portrait of Richard Mather by Foster was featured on a postage stamp in the U.S. Postal Service's 1998 "Four Centuries of American Art" series.