Fresno Metropolitan Museum to exhibit American Impressionist Anna Richards Brewster

Written by Jonathan Fast Tuesday, 30 November 2010 23:02

Fresno, CA - Anna Richards Brewster: American Impressionist is an examination of the struggles and triumphs of an American woman’s career in art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Brewster (1870-1952) 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, continued her success throughout her life and forged the way for other women starting to break into the professional and academic spheres of the art world.

The life and artistic career of this painter, daughter of the noted seascape artist William Trost Richards, were spent striving to express the inexpressible through the visual arts and in the process she became an acclaimed interpreter of nature, capturing its diverse beauty. This exhibition, first seen at the Hudson River Museum, spans Brewster’s 45 most productive years and includes more than 50 plein-air scenes, portraits and still-lifes in oil, watercolor, gouache and pen as well as letters to a friend written from her teenage to early married years.

Brewster traveled extensively, had a studio in England, and exhibited in Europe and America. After her marriage to Barnard College professor William Tenney Brewster in 1905, she settled in Scarsdale, a Westchester community.

Anna Brewster experimented with many different styles of expression and the show 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 and Clovelly to the realism of her Hopperesque Steam Table. She was influenced by J.M.W.Turner, Childe Hassam and other artists working in the style of Impressionism who contrasted with other influences such as the paintings of Rembrandt and Edward Hopper.

  A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which was organized by Dr. Judith Maxwell in collaboration with Susan Brewster McClatchy for the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science, Fresno, California. The Fresno Metropolitan Museum exists to serve the community of the curious. Brewster exhibit on view through 14 June, 2009.

Our Mission
In order to facilitate a greater understanding for the extraordinary achievements in human knowledge and creativity, and to satisfy the natural instinct to investigate and learn, the Fresno Metropolitan Museum will collect, preserve and exhibit, and educate audiences in the arts and sciences.

Our History
In 1978, a group of Fresno civic leaders began to explore the possibility of creating a regional museum for the San Joaquin Valley. From 1981-1985, these members of the community raised more than $5.5 million to open the Met in the historic downtown site of the Fresno Bee building. The Museum opened its doors to the community on April 8, 1984. Visit : www.fresnomet.org/

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