(New York, New York) â The American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) announced today the promised gift of a pair of portraits by John Brewster, Jr. The portraits have been given by Trustee Karin Barter Fielding and her husband, Dr. Jonathan Fielding, in honor of AFAMâs 60th anniversary. These works are the first by the artist to enter the Museumâs collection and are notable as representations of an iconic early folk artist.
Brewster is well known as a prolific itinerant portraitist who worked throughout New England in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, residing in Connecticut and later in Maine. His biography offers a rare window into the experience of a Deaf person in the first decades of the United States. Research on the artist confirms that he communicated by gesture and in writing. In 1817, when Brewster was in his 50s, he returned to Connecticut in order to attend the newly opened American School for the Deaf. He later went back to Maine, where he wou