Ada Augusta Brewster

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • August 30, 2021

At some point last March, before we officially closed for COVID-19 precautions, I was “rummaging” about in the MMA institutional archives and came across these images. Since then I did a tiny bit of digging to find out more about these very sweet watercolors of the MMA.  I found them in the scrapbook of Lydia Hinchman, one of our founders and a daughter of Maria Mitchell’s uncle, Peleg Mitchell Jr. They actually remind me of another watercolorist who worked for some time on Nantucket – J. B. Reid and I may have blogged about her long ago – she is a favorite of mine.


In any case, A. A. Brewster – or Ada August Brewster – was born in Kingston Massachusetts May 25, 1842 in a house called “Woodside.” That already sounds very pleasing. I have not found a lot about her but she did study with several well-known painters, particularly out West in California. As a child she showed promise as an artist. Her mother, Elizabeth Bates Brewster was something of artist as well. It seems before that however, she served as a nurse during the Civil War at Portsmouth Grove/Lovell General Hospital in Rhode Island. She would later work at the US Mint in Nevada. She studied art at the Lowell Institute in Boston under Samuel Rouse and at the California School for Design (now San Francisco Art Institute). It seems she was in California starting about 1879 and at the Design School she studied under Raymond Yelland and Virgil Williams. She traveled quite a bit and lived in Florida, California, New York and  Georgia – coming to rest in New York around the turn of the century. In, 1898 she was Curator of the Ladies Art Association, 107 West 125th Street, NYC. She was also a frequent visitor to Cape Cod and Nantucket. Thus, these images. In 1919, she would move back to Kingston and “Woodside” where she died in 1929. 


She did open her own studio in San Francisco and was known for being a portraitist and illustrator, as well as a painter of china and a teacher. She would follow with studios in St. Petersburg, FL and finally in New York. She was known as an artist, naturalist, historian, author, collector. Sort of sounds like Lydia Hinchman and her sisters – and Maria and her sisters – multi-talented.


JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 27, 2025
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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 19, 2025
May 27. {1857} There is this great difference between Niagara and other wonders of the world, that is you get no idea from descriptions or even from paintings. Of the Mammoth Cave you have a conception from what you are told, of the Natural Bridge you get really a truthful impression from a picture. But Cave and Bridge are in still life, Niagara is all activity and change. No picture gives you the varying form of the water of the change of color; no description conveys to your mind the ceaseless roar. So too the ocean must be unrepresentable to those who have not looked upon it. Maria Mitchell would tour the Mammoth Cave and the Natural Bridge during her trip to the southern United States as Prudence Swift’s chaperone – I have written of these travels and Prudence before. Niagara Falls is a place she likely saw on her way to visit her younger sister Phebe Mitchell Kendall, who once lived with her husband in Pennsylvania. I was a bit surprised that she feels the way she does about the Cave and Bridge being well-represented by images but I do kind of se her point. But Niagara, the ocean, any moving body of water – she is right. You don’t fully comprehend it until you hear it, touch and taste it, see its colors, and feel it splash, sprinkle, or mist across your face. Niagara certainly mists across your face – sort of like a breezy day at the beach and the salt mist that slowly builds across your face and coats the beach grass so that it shimmers in the sunlight. JNLF

Lily of the Valley

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 12, 2025
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