Robert Newton Hurley

Robert Newton Hurley (1894, London, England - 1980, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada), who signed his work R.N. Hurley, was an English-born painter who, after immigrating to Canada in 1923, became known for his watercolor paintings of the Saskatchewan landscape and sky.

Career Hurley had little formal training as a painter. As a teenager, he worked multiple jobs in England, including as a form-laborer and an apprentice printer-compositor. He later served during World War I in the Suffolk Regiment and afterwards became interested in painting. He took lessons in watercolour painting in London and studied the English watercolour painters such as John Sell Cotman before emigrating to Canada in his twenties. In Canada, he worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway for his "effective use of watercolour to illuminate the prairie sky."