Description

Coloured etching. Signed and titled below the plate lines. On paper.

Condition

The condition is typical for a picture of this age including some discolouration.

Biography

James Alphege Brewer was a British artist known for his etchings of European cathedrals and other scenes of church, college, and community, was born in the Kensington, London. He was the son of Henry William Brewer, noted artist of architectural history and his great uncle was E. Cobham Brewer(1810-1897), the polymath who compiled Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Among his older siblings were the artist Henry Charles Brewer and the organist and writer John Francis Brewer, (1864-1921).

James Brewer studied at the Westminster School of Art and in 1910, he married Florence Emma Lucas, also an artist from an artistic family. James exhibited at the Royal Academy, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, the Paris Salon, Royal Cambrian Academy, Hampstead Society of Artists, the Society of Graphic Art, and the Ealing Arts Club, where he was first Honorary Art Secretary and then Honorary Art Chairman. Brewer’s first big success as a young artist came with etchings in colour commemorating cathedrals and other edifices destroyed or damaged during World War I. But during World War II he turned away from the war and focused on scenes of natural beauty, producing woodcuts of mountain and pastoral scenes done in the Japanese manner.