Gilbert Stuart Newton

Gilbert Stuart Newton (2 September 1795 – 5 August 1835) was a British artist.

Life

Newton was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the twelfth child and youngest son of Henry Newton, a customs official, and Ann, his wife, daughter of Gilbert Stuart, snuff manufacturer at Boston, Massachusetts, of Scottish descent, and sister to Gilbert Stuart the portrait painter. His parents left Boston in 1776 as the British withdrew; but on the death of his father in 1803 his mother returned with her family to Charlestown, near Boston.

Newton was intended for a commercial career, but was taken on as a pupil by his uncle, Gilbert Stuart. Newton came to Europe with an elder brother, and studied painting at Florence. In 1817 he visited Paris on his way to England and there met Charles Robert Leslie, as well as Washington Allston and David Wilkie. After visiting the Netherlands Newton went with Leslie to London, and entered as a student at the Royal Academy. and the second with an accompanying unsigned story, later attributed to Maria Jane Jewsbury; this latter was in the Dover House collection, and, with The Adieu and another picture by Newton, was sold at Christie's on 6 May 1893. The Prince of Spain's Visit to Catalina (1827) was purchased by the Duke of Bedford and engraved in The Literary Souvenir for 1833.

Two pictures by Newton, Yorick and the Grisette (1830) and The Window or the Dutch Girl (1829), were purchased by Mr. Vernon and passed with his collection to the National Gallery; a third, Portia and Bassanio (1831), forms part of the Sheepshanks collection in the South Kensington Museum. Newton painted numerous other pictures, which found immediate purchasers, and were nearly all engraved. Among them were: Lear, Cordelia, and the Physician (Lord Ashburton), Abbot Boniface (Earl of Essex), The Duenna (royal collection), and The Importunate Author. He painted several portraits, including those of Thomas Moore, Sir Walter Scott, and Lady Theresa Lister. In 1842 a collection of engravings from his pictures was published with notices by Henry Murray, F.S.A., entitled The Gems of Stuart Newton, R.A. A portrait of his mother, Anne Stuart Newton, resides at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Literary connections Newton's picture of A Girl at her Devotions is twice poetically examined by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, firstly in her Poetical Catalogue of Pictures in The Literary Gazette, 1823, as , and again in her Poetical Sketches of Modern Pictures in The Troubadour (1826), as . A similar rendition of his painting The Disconsolate appeared in the Literary Gazette, 1829, with her poem

In addition to the pictures illustrated by Letitia Elizabeth Landon in The Literary Souvenir mentioned above, she wrote a further poetic illustration to (with an engraving by Charles Rolls) in The Amulet, 1833.

In conjunction with the painting above of The Prince of Spain's Visit to Catalina is a poem by Felicia Hemans,