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John Brewster Jr. (1766–1854) was a deaf portrait painter who created beautiful and ethereal images of American people during the formative period of the nation. This is the first major exhibition in more than forty years to highlight Brewster’s extraordinary life and work. Born in Hampton, Connecticut, Brewster helped create a style of American portraiture that came to dominate rural New England. Brewster was influenced by the paintings of Connecticut artist Ralph Earl but simplified the settings and introduced broad flat areas of color, and soft, expressive facial features. He was especially sensitive to the sitter’s face, emphasizing his or her direct gaze—as a deaf artist, eye contact became a moment of engagement and communication.

The exhibition of approximately fifty works is placed within the context of four milieus in which Brewster moved and worked. He descended from one of New England’s oldest Puritan families; he traveled easily among the elite families of Maine, Connecticut, and eastern New York State whose portraits he painted; he had exposure to a fledgling deaf community through the establishment in 1817 of the first school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut; and he knew and exchanged influences with the New England portrait painters of his time. These experiences combined to define who Brewster was not only as an artist who was incidentally deaf, but also and just as importantly as a deaf artist. In 1854 Brewster died at the age of eighty-eight. The luminous portraits he left behind comprise an invaluable record of his era and a priceless artistic legacy.

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"Acknowledged as the first museum in the world dedicated solely to collecting American art, the NBMAA is renowned for its preeminent collection spanning three centuries of American history. The award-winning Chase Family Building, which opened in 2006 to critical and public acclaim, features 15 spacious galleries which showcase the permanent collection and upwards of 25 special exhibitions a year featuring American masters, emerging artists and private collections. Education and community outreach programs for all ages include docent-led school and adult tours, teacher services, studio classes and vacation programs, Art Happy Hour gallery talks, lectures, symposia, concerts, film, monthly First Friday jazz evenings, quarterly Museum After Dark parties for young professionals, and the annual Juneteenth celebration. Enjoy Café on the Park for a light lunch prepared by “Best Caterer in Connecticut” Jordan Caterers. Visit the Museum Shop for unique gifts. Drop by the “ArtLab” learning gallery with your little ones. Gems not to be missed include Thomas Hart Benton’s murals “The Arts of Life in America,” “The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, September 11, 2001” by Graydon Parrish,” and Dale Chihuly’s “Blue and Beyond Blue” spectacular chandelier. Called “a destination for art lovers everywhere,” “first-class,” “a full-size, transparent temple of art, mixing New York ambience with Yankee ingenuity and all-American beauty,” the NBMAA is not to be missed."

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www.nbmaa.org/permanent-collection

The NBMAA collection represents the major artists and movements of American art. Today it numbers about 8,274 paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, including the Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection, which features important works by illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, and Maxfield Parrish.

Among collection highlights are colonial and federal portraits, with examples by John Smibert, John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and the Peale family. The Hudson River School features landscapes by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Martin Johnson Heade, John Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Church. Still life painters range from Raphaelle Peale, Severin Roesen, William Harnett, John Peto, John Haberle, and John La Farge. American genre painting is represented by John Quidor, William Sidney Mount, and Lilly Martin Spencer. Post-Civil War examples include works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, George de Forest Brush, and William Paxton, and 19 plasters and bronzes by Solon Borglum. American Impressionists include Mary Cassatt, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Willard Metcalf, and Childe Hassam, the last represented by eleven oils. Later Impressionist paintings include those by Ernest Lawson, Frederck Frieseke, Louis Ritman, Robert Miller, and Maurice Prendergast.

Other strengths of the twentieth-century collection include: sixty works by members of the Ash Can School; significant representation by early modernists such as Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Max Weber; important examples by the Precisionists Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Preston Dickinson, and Ralston Crawford; a broad spectrum of work by the Social Realists Ben Shahn, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Jack Levine; and ambitious examples of Regionalist painting by Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton, notably the latter’s celebrated five-panel mural, The Arts of Life in America (1932).

Works by the American Abstract Artist group (Stuart Davis, Ilya Bolotowsky, Esphyr Slobodkina, Balcomb Greene, and Milton Avery) give twentieth-century abstraction its place in the collection, as do later examples of Surrealism by artists Kay Sage and George Tooker; Abstract Expressionism (Lee Krasner, Giorgio Cavallon, Morris Graves, Robert Motherwell, Sam Francis, Cleve Gray), Pop and Op art (Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselman, Jim Dine), Conceptual (Christo, Sol LeWitt), and Photo-Realism (Robert Cottingham). Examples of twentieth-century sculpture include Harriet Frishmuth, Paul Manship, Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, and Stephen DeStaebler. We continue to acquire contemporary works by notable artists, in order to best represent the dynamic and evolving narrative of American art.

Pattens by Gopinath

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Smoke Photography - My first attempt