A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster

[Miss-Delectable]

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The Portland Museum of Art presents A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster, Jr., on view January 25, 2007 - March 25, 2007. The first comprehensive exhibition on the important American painter John Brewster, Jr. (1766-1854), this show features 50 outstanding paintings illustrating the full range of Brewster’s long and successful career. Brewster was not an artist who incidentally was Deaf but rather a Deaf artist, one in a long tradition that owes many of its features and achievements to the fact that Deaf people are, as scholars have noted, visual people. The exhibition and companion book provide a major assessment of Brewster’s life and art within his four worlds: his artistic influences, his distinctive painting style and techniques, his elite clientele, and the world of the Deaf in early America. He is particularly noted for his portraits of children, who are depicted with an angelic innocence rarely achieved in portrait painting.

The exhibition was organized by the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, and is funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the American Folk Art Society, Robert and Katharine Booth, and Jon and Rebecca Zoler. This exhibition has been made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the American Masterpieces program.

The Portland venue has been generously sponsored by Norton Insurance and Financial Services. Media support has been provided by WCSH 6 and Port City Life.

 

[Reba]

I'm familar with him. He's a very distant relative of mine (5th cousin, 6 times removed). We have a common Brewster ancestor.

I have a small copy of one of his paintings of another relative.

I wish I could see his exhibit.

Here's a little bit more info about him:

Biography triumphs in telling deaf artist's story
From: Boston Globe - Boston,MA,USA - Dec 30, 2004

By Barbara Hall, Globe Correspondent

A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr., By Harlan Lane, Beacon, 190 pp., illustrated, $35

Faces as pallid and evocative as full moons. Shadowy background tones of sienna and umber. Simple, stylized lone figures in the foreground, rendered with a genuineness, a clarity, respectfully. Artful yet guileless.

All are traits of John Brewster Jr.'s portraits, which, cumulatively, amount to what author Harlan Lane, in ''A Deaf Artist in Early America," calls the painter's ''Deaf visual advantage."

Brewster (1766-1854) was born deaf, the son of hearing parents. It was, as Lane says, a ''proud and privileged household." As a descendant of William Brewster, the Pilgrim leader, Brewster never lacked for prominent patrons. Some 250 of his paintings have been unearthed with, followers hope, more to come.

Brewster was a ''limner," an itinerant portrait painter. In many ways, he traveled apart from his limner peers, particularly those who were deaf. Because of his family's standing, he wasn't forced to trek from door to door around New England, portrait peddling. While he did allude to his ''unfortunate situation," he never signed his works ''sourd-muet" -- ''deaf mute" -- as did other deaf artists of his time.

Lane, an authority on deafness and professor in the psychology department at Northeastern University, explains in the biography -- which is tied to an exhibition tour of Brewster's work -- that Brewster's gift was manifest by age 25. At the outset of his career, he did make an appeal for sympathy. For example, records of 1779 confirm he advertised his services as an artist in a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., journal. ''All who may please to favor him in his unfortunate situation will be satisfied," the ad read. That subservience would in time give way to a self-assurance that coincided with a maturity of his style.

Brewster's career also nicely paralleled the rise of what the author calls ''the Golden Age of American portraiture" and closed with the advent of the daguerreotype, an early form of photography.

According to Lane, Brewster's works reflect an ''affirmation of family." In fact, one of the most insightful chapters examines Brewster's and his society's treatment of children. His paintings transcend the changing attitudes, from portraits of children as ''emotionless . . . miniature adults" to a public sense that ''adults were corrupt, but children's hearts and minds were innocent; they were little angels," notes Lane. (He points out that Brewster never married, perhaps because, like many other deaf, he feared foisting deafness on his progeny.)

Lane deftly helps the reader empathize with Brewster's plight/triumph. In one passage, for instance, he writes, ''What did it mean to Brewster to include a musical instrument in the portrait, with music presumably quite outside his experience? When asked how he imagined the sound of a trumpet, the Deaf Frenchman Jean Massieu, the leading Deaf educator of the period, answered that he supposed it was like a brilliant sunset."

...Although Lane suggests that Brewster's works are not ''folk art," stating that ''true folk art . . . is grounded in local custom and passed down across generations," my response is that Brewster's paintings -- in tone, naivete, clarity, and simplicity -- qualify as part of this genre.