Artist of the day, October 11, 2021: Algernon Newton RA, a British landscape (#1388)

Algernon Newton RA (1880–1968) was a British landscape artist known as the "Canaletto of the canals".

Newton was born in Hampstead, a grandson of Henry Newton, one of the founders of the Winsor & Newton the art materials company.

Early in World War I, Newton held the rank of Sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Later, he served with the Army and was invalided out in 1916 after catching pneumonia, recuperating over the next few years among the artist community at Lamorna, Cornwall.

In 1919 he returned to London and started exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Art. In the 1920s, he also regularly exhibited at the New English Art Club. He was elected ARA (Associate Royal Academician) in 1936, and a full RA in 1943.

His Evening on the Avon was commissioned for the Long Gallery of the RMS Queen Mary. A number of his paintings are in Art Galleries in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States – notably in the Tate Britain. In 2011 the Metropolitan Museum, New York acquired his painting Stormy Sunset on the East Coast (1939).

His obituary in The Times described him as "a painter of quiet distinction ... He could take the most forbidding canal or group of factory buildings and, without romanticizing or shrinking any detail, create a poetic and restful composition out of it." He himself once wrote: "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."

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Mr. Algernon Newton

 Dutch Garden from the Serpentine, 1922

Ealing, 1923

View of St Pauls from across the Thames, 1923

 Salisbury, Wiltshire, 1924 

Paddington Basin, 1925

The Backs of Houses, Harley Street, London, 1925

The Regent's Canal, Twilight, 1925

Isle of San Clemente, Venice, 1926

Venetian rooftops, 1926

Park Crescent, London, 1927

Canal Basin, 1928

Hove at sunset, 1928

Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland, 1930

The Regent's Canal, Paddington, 1930

Outskirts of Cheltenham, 1932

Early Morning near Kentish Town, 1933

The Thames, Surbiton, 1933

 The Surrey Canal, Camberwell, 1935

River Scene, 1938

San Xavier Mission, near Tucson, 1938

Canal near Paddington Pen, 1940

Kensington Gardens, 1940

Spring morning, Camden Hill, 1940

Winter Shadows, 1940

In the Brett Valley, 1941

 Little Paddocks, Berkshire, 1943

The 'Lord Nelson', Winter Morning, Beck Hole, 1943

The Avenue, 1944

Minster Court, York

The House by the Canal, 1945

Little Paddocks, Berkshire, 1950

A Gleam of Sunlight

Houses in a landscape

Stormy Sunset on the East Coast