(b Boston, MA, Dec 7, 1727; d Margate, Kent, Sept 16, 1792).
English painter, engraver and auctioneer of American birth. In 1742 he was apprenticed to the Boston engraver Thomas Johnston, though he abandoned engraving for painting (e.g. the group portrait of his own family, the Greenwood-Lee Family, c. 1747; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.). In 1752 he went to Paramaribo, Surinam, where in the space of five years he painted 113 portraits, which he recorded along with numerous other events and observations in a notebook. While there he painted his best-known work, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam (c. 1752–8; St Louis, MO, A. Mus.). It is the only tavern scene conversation piece painted in colonial America and was most likely inspired by a print of William Hogarth’s Midnight Modern Conversation (New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A).
Greenwood remained in Surinam until May 1758, when he departed for Amsterdam, where he helped reopen the Amsterdam Art Academy, returned to engraving and produced numerous mezzotints. While in the Low Countries he began buying Dutch Old Masters for English collectors and moved to London by ...