Anna Richards Brewster

Anna Richards was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1870. Her father William Trost Richards was an American landscape artist, her mother Anna Matlack a poet and playwright and two of her brothers became eminent scientists (one a Nobel Prize winner). Her father taught her from a young age, first insisting that she learn to draw accurately and later master the intricacies of depth, colour and tone. Her education became more institutionalized when she moved to New York, becoming a pupil of John LaFarge and William M. Chase at the Art Students League of New York and in Paris studied under Benjamin Constant and Jean Paul Laurens. With the encouragement of her parents she settled in England in 1895 first in Devon and then for several years she rented a studio in Cheyne Gardens, Chelsea. In 1905 she married William Tenney Brewster returning to America for his work as a literature professor.

Anna Brewster was an accomplished artist (winning the Dodge Award for the best picture by a woman in an exhibition at the National Academy in 1890) and she was a major influence on the burgeoning art scene in Scarsdale where she lived for over forty years. She was a member of the Women’s Club (and helped grow its art section) and one of the founders of the Scarsdale Art Association. She was greatly inspired by her extensive travel in Europe, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine and Syria and in oil she captured the banks of the Nile, a market place in Touggourt, sunset at Biskra, Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem, camel-drivers on the desert sands and washerwomen at Tozeurm.