Anna Mary Richards Brewster was born in Germantown, one of eight children born to the artist William Trost Richards (1833 1905). She first studied art with her father and then attended the Cowles School of Art in Boston, the Metropolitan School of Art in New York, and the Art Students League. She studied with H. Siddons Mowbray and William Merritt Chase in New York, and with John La Farge in Newport, Massachusetts. Brewster went to Paris in 1890 and attended the Académie Julian and She married the Shakespearean scholar and amateur poet William Tenney Brewster in 1905.