Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist

Organized by Dr. Judith Maxwell in collaboration with Susan Brewster McClatchy for the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science, Fresno California, this innovative and comprehensive exhibition encompasses Anna Richards Brewster’s (1870 – 1952) works in oil, watercolor, gouache, and pen designs for book-illustration. It brings together paintings and prints from private and public collections to resurrect the reputation of an artist who was one of the best-known American woman artists at the turn of the century, and who at the age of 20, won the prestigious Dodge Prize at the National Academy of Design for the best picture by a woman artist in 1890. Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist, seeks to demonstrate Brewster’s historical context and her role as a successful artist at the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when women were just starting to break into the professional and academic spheres of the art world.

It spans her 45 most productive years and includes more than 50 plein-air scenes, portraits and still-lifes, as well as some charming illustrations she did for a book written by her mother A New Alice in Old Wonderland, published by Lippincott in 1896. Also on view are examples of her revealing and thoughtful letters to her friend Annie Ware Winsor Allen, written from her teenage years through the early years of her marriage. The show is an examination of the struggles and triumphs of an American woman’s career in art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Anna Richards Brewster’s remarkable life and artistic career were spent striving to express the inexpressible through the visual arts. Brewster herself recognized this inherent paradox of art-making in a letter discussing the difficulty of painting nature: “The more terribly, piercingly beautiful she looks, the more baffling and inscrutable she is. It is great pain to see the grace of her every last gesture, and know that one cannot possibly even tell of it.” As Guest Curator Judith Maxwell describes in the opening of her catalogue essay Life in Art, Brewster is an artist who sought to capture the truth of nature and its divine and diverse beauty.

Anna Richards Brewster was born into a prominent New England family, the daughter of well-known landscape and marine painter William Trost Richards and the poet and writer Anna Matlack Richards. The Richards family traveled extensively in the Northeast of the United States, and further a-field in England, France, and Ireland. These journeys provided the subject-matter for William and Anna’s landscape and cityscape paintings and taught Anna to work from her day-to-day experiences. Unlike her father, who was devoted to natural truth (i.e. realism), Anna was interested in the possibilities of human artifice and worked in varying styles, at times influenced by J.M.W. Turner, Childe Hassam and other contemporary artists working in the style of Impressionism, at other moments influenced by the paintings of Rembrandt or Edward Hopper.

Anna’s artistic productions provide a fascinating view into her life. This is reflected in works showing a variety of locales once frequented by the artist: New York, where Anna traveled to in 1889 to find new mentors (John LaFarge and William Merrit Chase); Clovelly, England, where Anna went to pursue an independent artistic career; London, where Anna went to escape the isolation and quiet of Clovelly; and various other places such as Algeria, Greece, Spain, and Italy, seen with her husband William Tenney Brewster during his sabbaticals from teaching.

The show is designed to shed light on the reasons for Brewster’s current obscurity as well as on the art market at the turn of the 20th Century. She started painting at the age of 14, had a studio in England for nine years, and exhibited and sold both in Europe and in America. She continued to paint prolifically after her marriage to Barnard College English professor William Tenney Brewster in 1905, making oil sketches during their sabbatical travels around the world.

Although she had her husband’s encouragement and has been called one of the best-known American women artists at the turn of the century, today, few have heard of her or seen her paintings. This was due, in part, to her refusal to actively market her work after the death of her son in 1910, and in part to her experimentation with many different styles of expression. This made it difficult to categorize her work and for dealers to sell it.

To understand this phenomenon better, the exhibition is organized by style, from the Barbizon-influenced romanticism of her fantasy A Knight Errant, through the impressionist, loaded brush style of many of her landscapes and portraits like Devout Reading, Clovelly, to the harshly lit realism of her Hopperesque Steam Table.

Admission :
Adult - $5
Seniors and Children - $3
Members Free