John Brewster Jr

John Brewster Jr was born on May 30 or 31, 1766, in Hampton, Connecticut, one of several children of a physician. He was deaf, almost certainly from birth or early childhood, and had no known formal schooling as a child. In the 1790s he studied painting with the Reverend Joseph Steward in Scotland, Connecticut, and soon began working as an itinerant limner, traveling through Connecticut, Massachusetts, and eventually Maine to paint portraits of merchants, ministers, and their families, along with a number of distinctive full-length portraits of children.

In 1817, at age 51, Brewster enrolled at the newly founded Connecticut Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, now the American School for the Deaf, joining its inaugural class of seven students and studying there until 1820. This makes him one of the first documented deaf artists to receive formal instruction at an American school for the deaf. He settled in Buxton, Maine, in his later years and continued to paint portraits nearly until the end of his life. He died in Buxton on August 13, 1854, at age 88.

Brewster's critical standing rests on art-historical scholarship rather than contemporary reviews. Modern reappraisal is anchored in Harlan Lane's scholarship and in the Fenimore Art Museum's 2005 to 2006 exhibition, A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr, which traveled to the American Folk Art Museum and was widely described as the first major exhibition of his work in more than forty years. The recurring theme in this scholarship is Brewster's deafness and how it shaped both his social position as an itinerant painter and the unusually direct, attentive quality of his portraits, particularly his depictions of children. No exact verbatim critical quotations from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed for this profile.

Brewster's market is small and infrequent, consistent with an artist working two centuries ago whose paintings are concentrated in museums and long-held family and institutional collections. The highest price confirmed in available sources is USD 219,600, paid for a Brewster portrait that led a CRN Auctions sale; the exact sale date and location are not confirmed in public sources, and available research could not verify whether a higher price has since been achieved. Market summaries citing external analytics have put his cumulative auction turnover at roughly USD 1.75 million over more than two decades, a figure that should be read as directional rather than precise, since it comes from a single third-party market analysis rather than a primary auction record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Brewster, so attribution and provenance research done by the museums and historical societies that hold his work, together with Harlan Lane's scholarship, carry unusual weight in establishing authenticity. His auction market is thin, with relatively few documented sales at significant prices, so any single result, including his current auction high, should be treated as an isolated data point rather than a trend. There is no current gallery or estate representation of any kind; nearly all activity in his work happens through auction houses and specialist American folk art and Americana dealers, and works are sometimes offered as "attributed to" rather than firmly documented, which makes careful provenance review essential before any purchase.