The
Gilbert Stuart Newton CNHP plaque is mounted on Granville Street in Halifax, north of Duke Street alongside a CNHS plaque for the block of Granville Street on which they both stand.
Initially tutored by his uncle Gilbert Stuart, the well known American portrait artist, Newton went to Europe and studied painting at Florence. He later entered the Royal Academy in London as a student, from which he exhibited several of his works, such as
Don Quixote in his Study, M. de Pourceaugnac, The Dull Lecture, Captain Macheath upbraided by Polly and Lucy and
The Forsaken.
In 1827 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1829 and an academician in 1832. It was shortly after this that his mind began to fail, at which point he was institutionalized in an asylum at Chelsea. While he continued to paint his mental faculties never returned in any substantial way. He died at Wimbledon on August 5, 1835 at the age of 40.
Read a biography of Gilbert Stuart Newton
HERE.
The CNHP plaque reads as follows:
GILBERT STUART NEWTON 1794-1835
Born in Halifax, Newton had his first art lessons in Boston from his uncle Gilbert Stuart, painter of the George Washington portraits. Leaving for Europe in 1815 he settled in London and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1817. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1832. His career as a painter of genre and portraits was effectively ended in 1833 by insanity and he died in London of consumption two years later. A friend of the American writer Washington Irving and the Anglo-American painter Charles Robert Leslie, he was the subject of Israel Zangwill's novel The Master (1895).