PORTLAND – “A Deaf Artist in Early America,” the first comprehensive exhibition on John Brewster Jr., one of the best early American portrait artists who painted in a characteristically American style, is on view at the Portland Museum of Art.

The exhibit, up through March 25, features 50 paintings that illustrate the full range of Brewster’s long and successful career, including many that were painted in Maine. This is the first time in more than 40 years that Brewster’s masterpieces have been presented together.

“The exhibition presents a fascinating glimpse of early America through the eyes of someone who lived in a world of silence. Like all great artists, John Brewster Jr. transcended his personal challenges to leave an astonishing legacy,” said Paul D’Ambrosio, chief curator at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., who organized the exhibition.

Brewster was not an artist who incidentally was deaf, but rather a deaf artist, one in a long tradition that owes many of its 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.

Brewster was an artist who created hauntingly beautiful images of American life during the nation’s formative years. Though his techniques were rooted in European academic art, he moved beyond that rigidity to achieve a directness and intensity of vision. His portraits have been hailed as “masterpieces of American painting” and Brewster himself as “an undisputed master of the genre.”

Born in Hampton, Conn., Brewster began painting likenesses in the 1790s. He traveled widely in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and eastern New York state in search of portrait commissions. Brewster’s portraits show his ability to produce delicate and sensitive likenesses in full size or miniature, and in oil on canvas or ivory. He is particularly noted for his portraits of children, depicted with an angelic innocence rarely achieved in portrait painting.

In 1854, Brewster died at age 88, leaving an invaluable record of his era and a priceless artistic legacy.