John Brett

John Brett was born in the small market town of Reigate in Surrey at the foot of the North Downs. His father, Charles Curtis Brett, was a surgeon and captain in the army. An older sister of the painter, Rose Brett was also a painter and the two siblings even shared a studio for some time. From Rosa Brett's diaries it is clear that the young woman initially even exhibited and sold her own paintings under her brother's name. John Brett first had private art lessons with the well-known landscape painter James Duffield Harding and also with the painter Richard Redgrave . At the age of 22 he began his studies at the Royal Academy of Arts. Here he met, among others, the well-known art critic and patron John Ruskin , who thought very highly of Brett's work and also supported him generously financially. Brett's first and probably most famous painting was called "The Stone Crusher" and depicted a boy who laboriously crushes stones for road construction. It was based on a painting with the same name that Henry Wallis had painted the year before in the Swiss Aosta Valley. Ruskin was so taken with Brett's work that he "donated" him a study stay in Switzerland and Italy. and even bought another painting by Brett, "The Aosta Valley", for himself.