Background
Ann Mary Newton was born in Rome, where her father Joseph Severn was the English Consul. Newton was taught to draw by her father, and then on the Severn family"s return to England in 1841, studied with George Richmond, who employed her to produce copies of portraits he had painted.
Education
Newton studied in England under George Richmond and in Paris under Ary Scheffer.
Career
She specialized in portraits of children and worked in crayon, chalk, pastel and watercolour. In 1857 she received lessons from Ary Scheffer in Paris. In Paris she painted a portrait of the Countess of Elgin which was well reviewed and led to further society commissions in Britain.
She specialized in portraits of children and worked in crayon, chalk, pastel and watercolour.
In the mid-1850s she supported her family with a number of commissions, traveling to the homes of wealthy patrons. She made drawings of Greek sculpture for his public lectures and also designed illustrations for his History of the Discoveries at Helicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae (2 vols, 1862-1863) and Travels and Discoveries in the Levant (2 vols, 1865).
A number of her important sketchbooks, which make up an important picture-diary of her travels in the eastern Mediterranean and contain witty caricatures of the family, are in the possession of Severn descendants. In the 1860s she began to work in oils and exhibited a number of pictures in the Royal Academy exhibitions, most notably a self-portrait (National Portrait Gallery, London) and an Arthurian subject from Tennyson, Elaine (exh 1863).
She died of measles in 1866 at her marital residence, 74 Gower Street, Bloomsbury. at the age of thirty-three, having had no children.