John Foster

1648 – 1681

John Foster (1648 – September 9, 1681) was an early American engraver and printer who lived in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when the colony was still in its infancy. He is credited with producing the first printed image in British colonial America, from a woodcut[a] of the Puritan minister Richard Mather. He also printed the first map to appear in the colonies. 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 b