J alphege brewer biography sample
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Doughboy Family Memories Etched in the Architectural Art of J. Alphege Brewer
Doughboy Family Memories Etched In the Architectural Art of J. Alphege Brewer By Benjamin S. Dunham Originally published at the Doughboy Foundation web site (https://doughboy.org/). My first Brewer purchase was only a copy of a Brewer. I didn’t know it was a copy when I saw it in an antique booth in New Bedford. I signaled to my wife and asked, “Doesn’t this look like one of the cathedrals done by the brother of your great grandmother’s second husband?” The distant relative was the British artist James Alphege Brewer (1881-1946), and some years later, a family downsizing brought a few of his etchings into our home. After that, during a two-year stretch, I bought just about every Brewer etching that came on the market. In the process of collecting Brewer etchings, I learned a lot about the artist and his family, and I discovered that the print I found in New Bedford was a copy of his first version of the w
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J. Alphege Brewer (1881-1946)
James Alphege Brewer was born July 24, 1881, in the Kensington section of London, England. He was the son of Henry W. Brewer, noted artist of historical architecture and prominent convert to the Catholic Church, and the grandson of John Sherren Brewer, Jr., “the brilliant editor of the Calendar of Letters of Henry VIII.” His great uncle was E. Cobham Brewer, the polymath who compiled Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and authored numerous other important reference works. Among his older siblings were the artist Henry C. Brewer and the organist and writer John Francis Brewer.
James attended St. Charles Catholic College in Kensington before studying at the Westminster School of Art, where his brother Henry also trained. Other graduates of the Westminster School of Art included Aubrey Beardsley, “Jack” Butler Yeats (brother of poet W. B. Yeats), and, at the same time as James, Dorelia McNeill, later the commo
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The Context for
Brewer’s "Worthy Memorials"
During WWI, Brewer’s imposing etchings of cathedrals, city views, and medieval town halls
in Belgium and Northern France implicitly warned of threats to their existence and in some cases lamented their destruction. But how well did they passform with other artistic currents of the time?
In a 2014 article in The Guardian, Margaret MacMillan, author of The War That Ended Peace, wondered if artists like Picasso and Braque and writers like Henry James and Marcel Proust “somehow felt a catastrophe was bearing down on them and their societies.... For some,” she wrote, “war and violence were not things to be feared
but welcomed, as ways of speeding up the destruction of the old and the outworn. War, said the Italian futurist Marinetti, ‘is the sole hygiene
of the world.’ Rupert Brooke longed, he told his friends, for ‘some sort of upheaval.’” In music, as Mark Swed