History

History of the Collection

The Gray Brewer Highwaymen Collection of paintings is the product of a lifelong friendship between Gray Brewer and Harold Newton, one of the original Highwaymen painters.

Their friendship defied the racial barriers of the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and 60s. While thousands of whites purchased paintings from Newton during this period (an act noteworthy in itself), there were few who could actually call him a friend.

The legacy of this unique friendship is embodied in the Gray Brewer Highwaymen Collection.

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The following passages are excerpted from the definitive Harold Newton biography "Harold Newton: The Original Highwayman" by Gary Monroe (used with permission from the author):

     In the 1950s, Gray Brewer moved to Titusville to work as a court reporter. The Treasure Coast was "all back-country," and his job took him to many regional courthouses. He saw landscape paintings signed "H. Newton" wherever he traveled, often in judges' chambers. Brewer was determined to meet the artist and buy paintings. He drove around Fort Pierce and wherever he heard Harold might be. It took him a month to find the artist.

     One Saturday, Brewer stopped by a corner store in Gifford. "I drove up in a Cadillac because it was the best go-cart I could find. There were twenty-four or twenty-five people standing around. Everybody dropped everything but their candy and ice cream. They looked at me and asked, 'What are you doing here, Whitie?' I said I'm looking for Harold Newton. One man asked, 'Anybody know Harold Newton?' Everybody said no. 'I don't know him' was the standard answer." They weren't offering an outsider such information. As he walked away, two youngsters ran up and told him that Harold Newton lived "right dare" and pointed down the street.

     Brewer found the artist at home. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. He doesn't remember buying any paintings then, if there were even any to buy. "But the next time I did, and the next time, and the next time." Harold soon started coming to the Titusville Courthouse, usually with four paintings to sell. Brewer thinks their friendship opened the northern region for Harold.

Besides brandishing standard artists' tools, "Harold painted with a chicken feather -- anything he could put in his hand," says Gray Brewer. "I got a spoon he used."

Gray Brewer says that when Harold sold a painting, he and his friends would go to the bar and stay there until the money was gone. Brewer remembers Harold's brother Sam saying, "Harold didn't have any friends. He just had drinking buddies."

This is echoed by Gray Brewer's observation that "Harold painted and thought differently about painting than the other artists. The others were in it for the money. He painted for himself, at his own pace, when he felt like it."

Harold painted a picture for his friend Gray Brewer. As Harold tacked an 18"-by-24" board to the side of the house, Brewer glanced at his pocket watch. It was "right on the hour." Harold made a final brush stroke sixty minutes later, moss hanging off an oak tree limb. He walked back a few steps and said, "Guess that'll do it. You work too much, and it'll mess it up." The image was of a lone pine stand in front of which a pond surrounded by grasses and a scrub palmetto balance off an impasto sky that swirls with a hint of Van Gogh.

Gray Brewer once asked Harold why he put orange in the palmetto shrubs. Newton replied, "That's the way they be." Indeed, at sundown the plant might catch the light to reveal the warm glow and, as Brewer points out, there is an orange tint at certain times of the maturity of the plants. "When you got to looking, 'that's the way it be,'" he adds. To those who criticize Harold's palette as being extravagent or inaccurate, the ninety-eight-year-old Brewer exclaims, "They are not."

Harold wasn't stigmatized by race as he traversed the state selling his paintings during those charged and uncertain times. Gray Brewer explains, "Harold wasn't a black man. He was a painter who happened to have dark-colored skin. And he knew how to get along with everybody."