John Brewster, Jr, One Shoe Off, 1807. Fenimore Art Museum.

PORTLAND, MAINE.- The Portland Museum of Art presents A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster, Jr., on view January 25, 2007 - March 25, 2007. The first comprehensive exhibition on the important American painter John Brewster, Jr. (1766-1854), this show features 50 outstanding paintings illustrating the full range of Brewster’s long and successful career. Brewster was not an artist who incidentally was Deaf but rather a Deaf artist, one in a long tradition that owes many of its features and achievements to the fact that Deaf people are, as scholars have noted, visual people. The exhibition and companion book provide a major assessment of Brewster’s life and art within his four worlds: his artistic influences, his distinctive painting style and techniques, his elite clientele, and the world of the Deaf in early America. He is particularly noted for his portraits of children, who are depicted with an angelic innocence rarely achieved in portrait painting. (by courtesy of www.Artdaily.com)