About the work

Anna Brewster’s painting of Tucson comes from a group of works found in her studio at the time of her death in 1952. It was one of a select number of pieces that her husband, William Tenney Brewster, included in a privately published book in 1954 titled “A Book of Sketches by Anna Richards Brewster.” William discusses the significance of these paintings in the book’s introduction: 

“At her death in August, 1952, my wife, Anna Richards Brewster, left some two thousand oil sketches made in many parts of the world between about 1885 and 1945. … These sketches she often called “facts” for larger and more finished pictures. But some of the facts are so final that it has seemed to me desirable to reproduce some of the best for my own satisfaction and that of her friends. From many hundreds of fine sketches, I have chosen those that I know, or can infer, to have been her favorites.” 

William mentions the Tucson painting in particular when discussing the quality of Anna’s work:

“To the object she was so faithful that her sketches are of subjects and of effects, but no personal tricks are there. If you look at a sketch made on the Nile or in Norway, in South County or in Tucson, you may be quite sure that it looked so at that time, thought not just a transcription. For, like any artist, she left out much that a camera would have to record, and she selected and emphasized the more important matters.”

The Tucson painting is pictured in the final section of the book titled “Times and Seasons.” William says of this group: “[W]hat really counts is the record of color, light and shade that nature provides in more ways than any artist can match. … Such sketches tend to catch the sense of times and seasons … of early morning, of mid-morning, of afternoon, of twilight, of spring and summer and the various seasons.”

One of the only other known paintings to survive from Anna’s 1940 visit to Tucson is housed in the permanent collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

A first edition copy of William Brewster’s book about Anna’s studio sketches, one of 500 copies, is included with the painting.

About the artist… 

Anna Richards Brewster (1870-1952) was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the sixth of eight children in an upper-middle-class family. Her father was the noted marine and landscape painter William Trost Richards.

Anna was a woman who forged her way through a world dominated by male artists. She initially followed her father’s realistic techniques, but soon thereafter developed her own style. By age 14 she was exhibiting at the National Academy in New York City. In the late 1880s she studied in Boston under Dennis Miller Bunker, and later in New York with John LaFarge and William Merritt Chase

As a young woman, her paintings were exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York City, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and shown in many galleries that excluded most women artists.

At age 35 Anna married William Tenney Brewster, a professor at Barnard College, and in 1910 they settled in Scarsdale, New York. They spent their summers at a family cottage in Matunuck, Rhode Island, and traveled together extensively in Europe, North Africa, and on at least one occasion the American Southwest. On these trips she did numerous oil and watercolor sketches, including her painting of Tucson, Arizona, which Anna competed when she and William stayed at Tucson’s storied El Conquistador Hotel in April of 1940.

Over the course of a painting career that spanned more than 60 years, Anna emerged as one of America’s finest Impressionist painters. The fact that her name is not nearly as recognizable as Cassatt or O’Keefe is largely a matter of her lifelong reluctance to aggressively market her work. 

Her range of styles also made it more difficult for dealers to promote her paintings, thus further hindering Brewster from becoming a widely recognized name. Some of Anna’s works were representational, while others, like “Mid-Morning at Tucson,” flowed in an impressionistic mode, with looser brush strokes and more exploratory use of light and shadow. 

Although Anna’s fame receded in the years after her death, more attention is being directed towards her and other women artists who have been overshadowed by the historically male-dominated art world. The revival of interest in her work includes the traveling exhibition “Anna Richards Brewster: American Impressionist,” which toured in the US during 2008-09.  

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