The paintings which have come down to the present day from the Colonial Period, so far as they relate to America, are almost without exception portraits. Many of these were, as a matter of course, brought over from England and Holland; but that there were resident painters in the Colonies as early as 1667, is shown by a passage in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia," cited by Tuckerman. It is very natural that these "limners," to use a favourite designation then applied to artists, were not of the best. The masters of repute did not feel a call to dwell in the wilderness, and hence the works belonging to the beginning of this period are for the most part rude and stiff. Several of these early portraits may be seen in the Memorial Hall of Harvard University, at Cambridge, Mass. The first painters whose names have been preserved to us were not born to the soil. The honour of standing at the head of the roll belongs to JOHN WATSON (1685--1768), a Scotchman, who established himself at Perth Amboy, N.J., in 1715. Of his portraits none are at present known, but at the Chronological Exhibition of American Art, held in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1872, there was shown an India ink drawing by him, _Venus and Cupid_, executed on vellum. A better fate was vouchsafed to the works of JOHN SMYBERT, another Scotchman, who came to Rhode Island in 1728 with Dean, afterwards Bishop, Berkeley, in whose proposed college he was to be an instructor--probably the first movement towards art education made in the Colonies. Smybert settled and married in Boston, where he died in 1751 or 1752. He was not an artist of note, although his most important work, _The Family of Bishop Berkeley_, a large group, in which he has introduced his own likeness, now in the possession of Yale College, at New Haven, Conn., shows him to have been courageous and not without talent. Not all the pictures, however, which are attributed to him, come up to this standard. A very bad example to which his name is attached may be seen in the portrait of _John Lovell_, in the Memorial Hall of Harvard University. The influence exercised by Smybert on the development of art in America is due to an accident rather than to actual teaching. He brought with him a copy of the head of Cardinal Bentivoglio, by Van Dyck, which he had made in Italy, and which is still preserved in the Hall just named. It was this copy which first inspired Trumbull and Allston with a love of art, and gave them an idea of colour. Of the other foreigners who visited the Colonies during this period, the more prominent are BLACKBURN, an Englishman, who was Smybert's contemporary or immediate successor, and is by some held to have been Copley's teacher; WILLIAMS, another Englishman, who painted about the same time in Philadelphia, and from whose intercourse young West is said to have derived considerable benefit; and COSMO ALEXANDER, a Scotchman, who came to America in 1770, and was Stuart's first instructor.