Artist Anna Richards Brewster: The Scarsdale Connection

By Lesley Topping with Barbara Shay MacDonald

Anna Richards Brewster (1870-1952) is an acclaimed American Impressionist painter, who lived in Scarsdale with her husband, William Tenney Brewster, from 1910 till her death in1952. Brewster was a prolific artist of sketches, landscapes, portraits, still lives, and travel scenes from all over world and the United States. She also created many oil studies and paintings of Scarsdale. In her day, she was considered one of America’s finest Impressionist painters.

Born in 1870 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, she was a daughter of William Trost Richards, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, famous for his resplendent seascapes. Her mother, Anna Matlack Richards, was an author and poet, best known for her sequel, A New Alice in Old Wonderland. It was one several books that her daughter beautifully illustrated. Brewster’s talent was evident at an early age and she was encouraged by her parents who gave her the best education possible. She studied with William Merritt Chase and John LaFarge. At 19, she won the Norman W. Dodge Prize for the best picture painted in the United States by a woman. Unfortunately, that painting, “An Interlude to Chopin,” has been lost.

Though she initially followed her father’s realistic techniques, she soon developed her own style. 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. She also joined newly formed organizations for women artists, including The National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. Dedicated to her career, she was conflicted about getting married. However, in 1905, at the age of 34, she wed William Tenney Brewster, a professor at Barnard College, who greatly respected and admired her talent.

In 1910, the Brewsters built a classic Arts and Crafts house, which stills stands on Oak Way, off Fenimore Road, in Scarsdale. She was encouraged to move to Westchester by her longtime friend, Annie Ware Winsor Allen, a teacher who lived in White Plains. They had met in London in 1890, and their letters (excerpted on the website, arbrewster.com) reveal the challenges Anna faced as an independent woman and artist at the turn of the Twentieth Century.

Shortly before moving into their new home, the Brewsters suffered the loss of their only child, Herbert, who died of pneumonia at the age of four. Anna retreated from the professional art world, but never stopped painting or teaching. She was the founder of the Scarsdale Art Association and a member of the Scarsdale Woman’s Club. Her husband was also active in Scarsdale as a member of the Town Club and one of the presidents of the Scarsdale Library. Recalling how his wife was constantly inspired to capture her surroundings he wrote:

“She sketched deftly, accurately and rapidly and thus in more than sixty active years, made thousands of sketches all drawn and colored on the spot… From such sketches she often made larger and more finished pictures”

Anna Brewster painted many local scenes of Scarsdale. She would often walk across the road from her home to the five-hundred-acre estate of Emily Butler, still known as Fox Meadow, to sketch and create oil studies. Her paintings reflect rural Scarsdale before it became a modern suburb. Many of the locations of her paintings including the Fenimore Bridge and the Duck Pond on Heathcote Road will be immediately recognizable to Scarsdale residents. The Scarsdale Woman’s Club owns several of her paintings and displays, a few which depict her travels through Tunisia and her country home in Rhode Island. Anna’s grandniece, Susan Brewster McClatchy, who spent some years in Scarsdale, has extensively researched great aunt’s letters and work, and published Anna Richards Brewster: An American Impressionist edited by Judith Kafka Maxell, a collection of in-depth essays about the artist. After Anna’s death, her husband edited a four-volume set, A Book of Sketches by Anna Richards Brewster, which is available at the Scarsdale Library and he donated a large collection of her oil studies and paintings of Scarsdale to the Library.

Although Brewster’s fame receded over the years, more attention is finally being directed towards her and other women artists who have been overshadowed by the male-dominated art world. Today her paintings are owned by private collectors, and can be found at institutions including the Museum of the City of New York, the Lyman Allyn Museum in Connecticut, Barnard College in New York City, the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, the Massillon Art Museum in Ohio, the University of Georgia Art Museum, the San Joaquin Pioneer Museum and the Guernsey Museum in the United Kingdom. In Westchester, there have been solo shows of her work at the Hudson River Museum and the Scarsdale Library.

You can watch our short film about Anna Richards Brewster here. Below are brief slide shows of her paintings and oil studies in the Scarsdale Library Collection.