"There is beauty to be found in everything, you only have to search for it: a gasometer can make as beautiful a picture as a palace on the Grand Canal, Venice, it simply depends on the artist's vision." Compared with the lives of many artists, Algernon Newton's appears at first sight comparatively straightforward and uneventful. A long, successful and steadily productive career spanning the best part of fifty years, a second marriage of great stability and of equal duration would seem to find their perfect reflection in the tranquil, ordered and unchanging neo-eighteenth century surfaces of his canvases: except that their subjects are more often than not those of domestic decay and industrial dereliction rather than the great houses and grand
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More immediately, and rather engagingly, it made him a fanatic for physical excercise, including Indian clubs, with which he was to practise regularly well into later life. This made him a very imposing figure, well over six foot, a gentle but also very powerful giant. He was in the event taken away from school after only five years, reaching Clare College Cambridge after private tuition and crammers in 1899. Towards the end of his time at Frank Calderon's School of Animal Painting, in 1903, he submitted a painting "The Arab 'Rebab' " to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and not only had it accepted (something which was to happen again only twice in the next twenty years), but, even more to his amazement, hung "on the line". Apart from this not much else is known of his-three years there as a student. The only thing that can be said with much certainty is that, as far as his later natural talents were to be revealed, the school set him off firmly in the wrong direction by encouraging him to paint sporting paintings and country genre scenes. People and animals, particularly when in motion, were the two things with which he was always least …show more content…
At one pOint of total artistic despair, Newton went to work with his brother, Reginald, on his uncle's ranch in British Columbia, before finally volunteering for the army at the beginning of the 1914-18 War. There seems, in other words, to have been few moments of the domestic regularity and tranquility which he later found so necessary to his art. There were odd bursts of painting activity recorded in his meticulously kept record book, for example about 1911, when he was living at Northchurch in the Chilterns. Then several works are recorded, mostly in gouache, of which the large and rather striking House with green shutters (cat. no. 2) is a rare surviving example. The six windows, all wide open to exactly the same level and revealing shadowy interiors, focus the attention, and by their arbitrariness lend a distinctly eccentric quality to the whole painting that curiously prefigures his architectural paintings of the 1920's and 30's. It is in this year too that he had a Cottage Interior (present whereabouts unkown) accepted and hung in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Nigel asleep (cat. no. 3) one of a number of attractive small gouache studies of his children may belong to this period as
More immediately, and rather engagingly, it made him a fanatic for physical excercise, including Indian clubs, with which he was to practise regularly well into later life. This made him a very imposing figure, well over six foot, a gentle but also very powerful giant. He was in the event taken away from school after only five years, reaching Clare College Cambridge after private tuition and crammers in 1899. Towards the end of his time at Frank Calderon's School of Animal Painting, in 1903, he submitted a painting "The Arab 'Rebab' " to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and not only had it accepted (something which was to happen again only twice in the next twenty years), but, even more to his amazement, hung "on the line". Apart from this not much else is known of his-three years there as a student. The only thing that can be said with much certainty is that, as far as his later natural talents were to be revealed, the school set him off firmly in the wrong direction by encouraging him to paint sporting paintings and country genre scenes. People and animals, particularly when in motion, were the two things with which he was always least …show more content…
At one pOint of total artistic despair, Newton went to work with his brother, Reginald, on his uncle's ranch in British Columbia, before finally volunteering for the army at the beginning of the 1914-18 War. There seems, in other words, to have been few moments of the domestic regularity and tranquility which he later found so necessary to his art. There were odd bursts of painting activity recorded in his meticulously kept record book, for example about 1911, when he was living at Northchurch in the Chilterns. Then several works are recorded, mostly in gouache, of which the large and rather striking House with green shutters (cat. no. 2) is a rare surviving example. The six windows, all wide open to exactly the same level and revealing shadowy interiors, focus the attention, and by their arbitrariness lend a distinctly eccentric quality to the whole painting that curiously prefigures his architectural paintings of the 1920's and 30's. It is in this year too that he had a Cottage Interior (present whereabouts unkown) accepted and hung in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Nigel asleep (cat. no. 3) one of a number of attractive small gouache studies of his children may belong to this period as