HIS NAME AND his work might not mean a thing to you. But they really should. Richard Newton was a caricaturist who died an unfulfilled talent in 1798, aged just 21. Had he lived, I’m sure his legacy would have rivalled that of the mighty James Gillray.
Newton’s work sometimes betrays his youth, and can be a little stiff and overworked. But it always shows his great potential, and when he’s on form, his etchings look startlingly modern, with a quality of line that prefigures comic-book art and pocket cartoons of the 20th century. In fact, he was an early pioneer of strip cartoons, and to my eyes much of his output of around 300 prints has a look of early Disney about it.
It is believed Newton was the son of a Drury Lane (London) haberdasher. Details of his childhood and tutelage are unknown, but he engraved his earliest surviving print when he was just 11 years old. In 1791, at the age of 14, his precocious talent had burgeoned sufficiently to attract the attention of the radical publisher William Holland, who took him on as an apprentice or draughtsman.
Holland was taken with Newton’s comic inventiveness, and his ability to react quickly to events and dash off powerful caricatures. One of Newton’s first prints from these early days is a satire about the king and queen, and Holland published more than a dozen of his caricatures the following year.
In 1793, Holland was imprisoned in Newgate for printing a seditious work, but the industrious and enterprising Newton continued publishing his own engravings from his employer’s Oxford Street premises. Newton visited Holland in gaol, and produced portrait groups of prisoners and visitors. When Holland was released in 1794, Newton’s productivity increased markedly. In the autumn of 1794, he painted a watercolour caricature of society personalities gathered in Holland's exhibition rooms, parodying engravings displayed at the Royal Academy’s famous art exhibitions. By December 1796, he had etched more than 100 prints, including two in the ‘progress’ genre, which told short narratives, and these are the works that anticipate modern strip cartoons.
Somewhat chastened by his imprisonment, Holland grew more careful about the political targets he chose, and Newton seems to have been prompted by both this and the death of his father to follow his own path. In 1797, when he was barely 20 years old, he opened his Original Print Warehouse, in Brydges Street, Covent Garden, and supplemented his income by painting portrait miniatures of clients.
Newton was a young radical, and his work is often acerbic and bawdy. One of his fruitiest pieces is entitled A Peep into Brest with a Navel Review! This shows a lecher ogling two brazen ladies, whose dedication to fashion has led them to wear dresses with the stays open to their waists, leaving nothing to the imagination. In 1797 he published Head – And Brains, a caricature satirising the co-dependent political relationship of George III and his prime minister, William Pitt the Younger.
One of his last known prints is Treason!!! (1798), in which the English archetype, ‘John Bull’ – who is shown in an unusually cheerful and defiant mood for this time - blasts a lavish fart at a portrait of King George III pasted to a wall. Newton fell ill in the spring of 1798, and died in London in December the same year.
Until his own death in 1815, Holland continued to sell Newton’s prints, but they were forgotten thereafter, unlike the work of many of the young caricaturist’s longer-lived peers. It wasn’t until the 20th century that his work was reappraised, and his sadly curtailed talent was finally recognized.
Fascinating to think he was one of the first to draw what we now know as a comic strip artist. Is Newton’s art widely available? Is it rare as hens teeth? I’m wondering whether I might find a print in an antiques shop next time I go in!
Thank you, Very interesting article.