John Foste, 1648-1681

John Foster, the fourth child of Hopestill and Mary (Bates) Foster, was the earliest engraver in what is now the United States and was the first printer in Boston. He was not the sour Puritan of legend, for he played the fiddle and is believed to have painted the likenesses of some of his contemporaries, John Davenport and Richard Mather, among others. He excised a likeness of Mather on a wood block and printed an engraving of him. He was the author an almanac for which he made his own astronomical calculations.

Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1648, John Foster developed a reputation among his contemporaries and later historians as a man of many talents. An “ingenious mathematician” and schoolmaster, Foster also became the first printer in Boston and the first engraver in New England. He graduated from Harvard in 1667 and, for a time, returned to Dorchester to teach school. On Christmas Day, 1674, just another working day in Puritan Boston, Foster purchased a printing press, which he moved to Boston and set up at the “Sign of the Dove.”

John Foster made “A Map of New England” to illustrate William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England printed in Boston in 1677.

Illustration of the “The Copernican System” from John Foster’s An Almanack of Coelestial Motions for the Year of the Christian Epocha, 1681. Foster’s diagram of the planets revolving around the sun is the first illustration of the Copernican system published in New England. The diagram was published in his almanac for 1675 and reprinted in 1681. (Foster, a Dorchester resident, had his almanac published by Samuel Green in 1675. A few months later, Foster established his own press, the first in Boston, and competed with Green by printing as well as writing his almanacs.

Picture from New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century. Vol. 2. Exhibition catalog from Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1982.

John Foster also made a woodcut portrait of Dorchester’s minister Richard Mather, Dorchester’s influential puritan minister, and father of Increase Mather and grandfather of Cotton Mather.

Foster’s printing career was influential but brief. He died of consumption in 1681, at the age of 33.

The inscription on Foster’s grave stone illustrates his abilities as a mathematician and astronomer.  The flame represents life, and Father Time tries to stop the skeleton as it reaches its hand of death to snuff out the flame.

In his own day, Foster was memorialized in verse in two funeral elegies printed in Boston. One elegy, by Thomas Tileston, describes Foster’s life and education and then continues:

Adde to these things I have been hinting
His skill in that rare ART OF PRINTING
His accurate Geography
And Astronomick Poetry;
And you would say ’twere pitty He
Should dy without an Elegie

Funeral Elegy
Upon the much to be Lamented Death and most
Deplorable Expiration of the Pious, Learned, Ingenious,
And Eminently Usefull Servant of God
Mr John Foster
Who Expired and Breathed out his Soul quietly
Into the Arms of His Blessed Redeemer
At Dorchester, Sept. 9th Anno Dom. 1681
Aetatis Anno 33

Here lye the relict Fragments, which were took
Out of Consumtion’s teeth, by Death the Cook
Voracious Apetite dost thus devour
Scarce ought hast left for worms t’ live on an Hour
But Skin & Bones no bones thou mak’st of that
It is thy common trade t’ eat all the fat.
Here lyes that earthly House, where once did dwell
That Soul that Scarce [ha]th left its Parallel
For Sollid Judgment Piety & Parts
And peerless Skill in all the practick Arts
Which as the glittering Spheres, it passed by
Methinks, I Saw it glance at Mercury;
Ascended now: ‘bov time & Tides ‘t abides,
Which Sometimes told the world, of Times & Tides.
Next to the’ Third Heavens the Stars were his delight,
Where’s Contemplation dwelt both day & night,
Soaring unceartainly but now at Shoar,
Whether Sol moves or Stands He doubts no more.
He that despis’d the things the world admired,
As having Skill in rare things acquired,
The heav’ns Interpreter doth disappear;
The Starre’s translated to his proper Sphere.
What e’re the world may think did Cause his death
Consumpton ’twas not Cupd, Stopt his breath.
The Heav’ns which God’s glory doe discover,
Have lost their constant Friend & instant Lover
Like Atlas, he help’t bear up that rare Art
Astronomy; & always took his part:
Most happy Soul who didst not there Sit down
But didst make after an eternal Crown
Sage Archimede! Second Bezaleell
Oh how didst thou in Curious works excell!
Thine Art & Skill deserve to See the Press,
And be Composed in a Printers dress.
Thy Name is worthy for to be enroll’d
In Printed Letters of the choicest Gold
Thy Death to five foretold Eclipses Sad,
A great one, unforetold doth Superad,
Successive to that Strange Aethereal Blaze,
Wheron thou didst so oft astonish’d gaze;
Which daily gives the world Such fatal blows:
Still whats to come we dread; God only knows.
Thy Body which no activeness did lack
Now’s laid aside like an old Almanack
But for the present only’s out of date;
Twil have at length a far more active State.
Yea, though with dust thy body Soiled be,
Yet at the Resurrection we Shall See
A fair Edition & of matchless worth,
Free from Errata, new in Heav’n Set forth:
Tis but a word from God the great Creatour,
It Shall be Done when he Saith IMPRIMATUR.
Semoestus cecinit
Joseph Capen

Sources:

Black, Jeannette D. The Blathwayt Atlas. Providence: Brown University, 1975.

Green, Samuel Abbott. John Foster: the Earliest American Engraver and the First Boston Printer. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1909.