Anna Richards Brewster (1870‱952) came to maturity in America’s Gilded Age when increasing numbers of women sought to become professional artists in the face of daunting odds and societal inhibitions. While many of her compatriots dropped out, she persevered, becoming a skilled and appealing painter, and leaving a significant oeuvre that is today enjoying revived interest.
Brewster traveled extensively, had studios in England and the United States and experimented with Barbizon tonalities, brighter hues of Impressionism and realism. Her work was influenced by her father, Rembrandt, J.M.W. Turner, Childe Hassam and Edward Hopper.
Brewster had the advantage †and disadvantage †of being the daughter of William Trost Richards (1833‱905), a noted land- and seascape painter associated with the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. She benefited from watching him work, traveling with him on painting excursions, and he was her first teacher. On the other hand, her accomplished work was often viewed in the shadow of her father’s acclaimed canvases.
Moreover, she had to contend with the widespread idea of her time that women were “weekend” artists, painting and drawing as a social divertissement, and the belief that women had neither the energy, strength nor perseverance to produce first-class art. In these contexts, her life was filled with struggles and setbacks, achievements and triumphs as she worked to establish a place in the male-dominated art world of her day.
Overall, Brewster’s commitment to leading a model Christian life and being a good daughter and wife often clashed with her desire to be an independent artist and succeed in the marketplace.
Her work is owned by a number of museums, and there have been sporadic exhibitions of her art, most recently in the 1980s. In the last few years, there has been renewed interest in Brewster, both for the quality of her oeuvre and for her role as a successful artist in challenging times.
The struggles and achievements of her career are documented in “Anna Richards Brewster: American Impressionist,” on view at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art & Science through June 14. Comprising 50 plein air scenes, still lifes and portraits in oil, watercolor, gouache and pen, it is organized by independent curator Judith Kafka Maxwell in collaboration with Susan Brewster McClatchy, a grandniece and longtime admirer of Brewster.
Anna Richards was born in Germantown, now a section of Philadelphia, the youngest of six children, and raised in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Her father recognized her talent early on and became her first teacher. Her early paintings show the influence of his precise, Ruskinian style. “A Knight Errant,” painted around 1885 when she was 15, offers a romanticized view of a chivalrous knight assisting a comely young lady on horseback.
Starting in 1890, classes with John La Farge and William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York encouraged her to adopt a brighter palette and freer brushwork in the Impressionist manner. These departures from her father’s realist style did not sit well with him. “He was critical of these new directions,” observes art historian Wanda M. Corn and became “an exacting critic.” Nonetheless, she retained throughout her career the careful drawing techniques she had learned from her father. In 1890, she won a National Academy of Design prize for the best work by a woman in the United States.
After visiting England several times on painting sojourns with her father, she struck out on her own, setting up studios in Cornwall and London. “This is her period of greatest personal growth and independent exploration,” says Corn.
For a time, seeking to hone her skills and create marketable works, Brewster dabbled in painting, painting miniatures, designing stained glass and drawing illustrations. That kind of versatility was encouraged at the Academie Julian in Paris, which she attended before coming to England.
The value of disciplined drawing she learned from her father and Julian’s training in work that was adaptable and commercial stood her in good stead in fine drawings to illustrate A New Alice in the Old Wonderland and caricatures for Bill Nye’s Comic History of England . Skillfully done, they are still amusing to Twenty-First Century viewers.
Brewster never had a great patron to advance her career, but by exhibiting on both sides of the Atlantic, she became one of the best-known American female artists by the turn of the century. She returned to the United States in 1905 after marrying Barnard College English professor William Tenney Brewster. Settling in Scarsdale, N.Y., she continued to paint prolifically and conducted classes for the Scarsdale Women’s Club until two years prior to her death.
A Unitarian and admirer of the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brewster shared the conviction that the natural world was an expression of God’s power and presence. She sought in her landscapes to illustrate those spiritual qualities.
She saw nature as “terribly, piercingly beautiful,” as well as “baffling and inscrutable.” Although she said that “It is a great pain to see the grace of her [nature’s] every last gesture, and know that one cannot possibly even tell of it,” she utilized a variety of styles to try to capture nature’s many looks and moods.
Some of Brewster’s early, narrative landscapes, like “Scarsdale Scene,” 1912‱915, seem drawn from the Currier & Ives playbook. Also from that period are pale views of gardens and fox meadows that lack the oomph of later work. An equally restrained watercolor, “Bass River, Cape Cod,” 1923, is an experiment in Japonisme, with a focus on figures and atmosphere.
By contrast, an oil, “Mount Etna From Taormina, Sicily,” bursts with strong color, especially the bright blue of the imposing mountain glimpsed over a walled terrace.
In “Italian Gardens at Mount Vesuvius,” the famously rich soil of the volcanic mountain in Italy has yielded some vividly hued blooms, flanked by large pots that frame the distant peak.
Another strong, compelling canvas, although measuring only 8 by 9 inches, “Garden in Santa Barbara, California,” 1940, offers beautifully painted trees, flowers and other vegetation with reflections in a small pool. These paintings share a midair perspective that adds to their effectiveness.
Brewster painted a few portraits on commission, but mainly created likenesses of friends, family and folks she encountered on her travels. She did depict seven presidents of Columbia University on commission.
She painted affectionate views of her father working at his easel, her young niece pausing to read a book outdoors and her infant son in a tiny watercolor. In her travels, Brewster complained that she had direct contact largely with guides and beggars. This makes “Egyptian Fellah,” no date, a closeup of a squinting, dignified, turbaned peasant, particularly interesting.
Some of her best work came during tours with her husband in Europe and the Middle East during his sabbaticals. Encouraging her to record their surroundings, he called his wife “an eager diarist in color.”
Paintings created by Brewster about her travels, based on on-site sketches, are characterized by closely observed details, animated figures and palpable moods and atmosphere. One highlight of the exhibition, “The Tuileries, Paris,” 1926, shows a youngster under the watchful eye of his mother pulling a toy cannon on a pathway beneath an imposing stone building, the whole animated by large swatches of brilliantly colored flowers.
In “Venice, Italy,” circa 1933, Brewster used broad, forceful brushwork to underscore the immediacy of the picture-perfect view of a gondola, shimmering canal, bridge and ancient structures flecked with greenery. It is another small †8 by 6 inches †vignette, exquisitely painted.
In a serene domestic scene, “A Cup of Tea in Holland,” circa 1902, Brewster conveyed a “quietly luminescent world,” in Maxwell’s words. It is reminiscent of domestic interiors painted by American expatriate Gari Melchers around the same time in the Netherlands.
Brewster’s Middle Eastern cityscapes focused primarily on narrow alleys and marketplaces, such as the watercolor “Arab Marketplace,” 1926, in which all manner of robed, turbaned men gather among an array of exotic urns and vases. It is “clearly constructed off-site from numerous sketches made of different types she saw on her travels,” says art historian Leigh Culver.
During her nine years in England, Brewster painted numerous views of famous landmarks such as Trafalgar Square, Big Ben, Houses of Parliament and the Thames, as well as scenes of country village life. “They focus on the relation of the past to the present and her own relation to the social world around her,” observes Culver.
Thus, “Trafalgar Square, London,” circa 1900, depicts a scene viewed from the front of the National Gallery, where she spent a lot of time studying and copying historic paintings. The snowy vignette “The Window from My Studio (Cheyne Gardens, London),” 1900‱905, suggests her pride in her workplace and her ability to capture the hazy atmosphere, dim light and palpable cold of London in the grip of winter.
Another haze envelopes “The Big Ben of Westminster,” 1900, as the famous, towering clock, flanked on one side by the spires of Westminster Abbey, frames a statue in the foreground. A similarly delicate touch marks two quiet village scenes, “Gossip in Guernsey” and “Minehead, Somerset, England,” 1905.
Brewster painted many delicate and meticulous still lifes, achieving a mastery of the genre whether depicting such flowers as irises, posies and roses, or ceramics, cloth, furniture and a mantelpiece. “Still Life,” before 1905, a watercolor on board measuring 6½ by 4 inches, was “clearly a chance for Brewster as a 17-year-old artist to prove that she could control color, light, shadow, shape, depth, drapery, texture and finish,” say exhibition organizers.
At the age of 63, Brewster undertook a major experiment in realism with “The Steam Table,” 1933, a fascinating view of five men from the back silhouetted against the glaring artificial light of a cafeteria that illuminates the uniformed servers waiting on them. This is not the hard-edged realism of some of her contemporaries, but more like the vignettes of loneliness and angst associated with Edward Hopper. Maxwell calls the painting “A vision of what Brewster might have produced had she fully embraced some of the more modern approaches to realism&”
Given the high and high-minded standards she set for herself, the demands of her marriage and the daunting impediments to women artists of her time, Anna Richards Brewster carved out a remarkable career. She was not only a role model for women in a challenging field, but created works of lasting value.
As Corn writes in her catalog introduction, Brewster’s “story&s like that of many of her female peers. She had many supportive friends and patrons, but did not find lasting fame. Her legacy to us is both her art and her story. Her art is sophisticated, learned and enduring. Her life’s story teaches us how hard a woman had to work to have any success as an artist at the turn of the last century.”
“Thanks to this exhibition and catalog,” concludes Corn, “we can now integrate Brewster’s career and paintings into the larger, complex history that is emerging in scholarship about this transitional generation of women artists who all had one foot in the Victorian and the other in the modern era.”
The exhibition catalog, edited by Maxwell with an introduction by Corn and essays by Susan McClatchy, Culver and Kirsten Swinth, offers insights into Brewster’s art, as well as her aesthetics, education, travels, disappointments and accomplishments.
The Fresno Metropolitan Museum is at 1555 Van Ness Avenue. For information, www.fresnomet.org or 559-441-1444.
