NEWTON, Algernon Cecil

1880 - 1968

Algernon Cecil Newton was born at Hampstead, London on 23 February 1880, youngest child of Arthur Henry Newton (1830-16 December 1901), colour manufacturer of Windsor & Newton, and his wife Georgianna Tregoning née Nicholls (1837-2 April 1918), who married at Phillack, Cornwall on 22 September 1859. Algernon was educated at Farnborough School and spent a couple of years at Clare College, Cambridge, leaving in 1900 without taking a degree, and then studied at various art colleges in London, including the School of Animal Painting in Kensington run by Frank Calderon (1865–1943). Newton specialised in urban views painted in a sombre, naturalistic style. Early in the First World War, Newton held the rank of Sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, later serving with the Army before being invalided out in 1916 with pneumonia, recuperating over the next few years among the artist community at Lamorna, Cornwall. In 1919 he returned to London and in 1920 exhibited forty landscapes at the Eldar Gallery in Great Marlborough Street and started exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Art and elected an Associate of the Royal Academy on 18 February 1936, a member on 23 April 1943 and a senior on 1 January 1956, and in the 1920s he regularly exhibited at the New English Art Club. From 1923, much of his work was made up of urban views of London, often depicted without figures and thereby creating a sense of profound stillness and calm. He avoided the more famous parts of the city, preferring instead the then run-down areas of Bayswater, Paddington and the industrial landscapes along the Regent’s Canal in Camden Town and Kentish Town. Newton married, firstly at St Peter, Belsize Park, Hampstead on 3 January 1903, author Marjorie Emelia Balfour Rider (1880-1943), daughter of William H. Rider, and had two sons, one being the actor Robert Newton (1905-1956), and two daughters, before they divorced. He married secondly at Kensington in 1921, Elsie Mary Willmott Richards (23 July 1886-12 April 1974). In 1939, an 'artist painter', living at Hill Farm, Stratford St Mary, Ipswich with his wife Elsie. Algernon Cecil Newton died at 16 Vicarage Gate, Kensington, London W.8, on 21 May 1968. His 'Evening on the Avon' was commissioned for the Long Gallery of the RMS Queen Mary and several of his paintings are in Art Galleries in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. His auction record is £128,500, set at Bonham's on 10 June 2015 for his oil 'City of London from Hampstead Heath' (1949).

Royal Academy Exhibits
from 154 Adelaide Road, Hampstead, West London
1903 981 Portrait of the Arab 'Rébab' - watercolour
from Rosemary Cottage, Northchurch, Berkhamsted, Berks.
1911 955 A Cottage Interior - watercolour
from Bodrigg, St Buryan, Cornwall
1918 713 Molly - watercolour
from 4 Kildare Gardens, West London
1923 831 Devonshire House - watercolour
1924
1925
1927
1928
1929
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
from Hill Farm, Stratford St Mary, Suffolk
1939 400 Study for a Country House Portrait
         420 Sentinels of Peace
         511 Snow Scene
         544 The River Stour near Sudbury
1940 441 A Suffolk Landscape
         545 A Trout Stream
         583 Winter Shadows
         680 Inland Water, Dorset
         847 A Sketch for a Nude
         864 A Sketch for a Landscape
1942
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1968
1969

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Works by This Artist