Robert Loftin Newman was an American figure painter. He specialized in oil on canvas as his medium.
Background
Robert Loftin Newman was born on November 10, 1827 in Richmond, Virginia, United States. The family moved to Louisa Court House, Virginia then when Robert was eleven years old, to Clarksville, Tennessee. As a boy he read much about art and artists, and at the age of seventeen he had already begun to experiment for himself with paints and brushes.
Education
Newman was enabled to go to France to take up the serious study of painting. He entered the atelier of Thomas Couture in Paris but remained there only a few months and never received any subsequent academic instruction.
Career
After a year's absence from home Newman returned to Tennessee in 1851. During a second journey to France in 1854 he formed the acquaintance of William Morris Hunt, another pupil of Couture, who took him to Barbizon and introduced him to Jean François Millet. Newman at once bought "Le Vanneur" and other paintings by Millet, but in later years he was obliged to part with them.
He returned to the United States in 1855. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 he was employed by the Confederate government at Richmond as a draftsman, and in 1864 he was conscripted and served in the 16th Virginia Regiment. After the war was over he pursued his art in obscurity, for a time in Baltimore, where he worked in a sign-painter's loft, and afterward in New York, where he had a studio in West Tenth Street. In 1882 and twice thereafter he found his way back to Barbizon. Altogether he spent a year and a half there. He was deeply in sympathy with the tendencies of the Barbizon painters, and had much in common with them in his ideals and sentiment. After making New York his home he exhibited rarely, and those artists and collectors who knew him and appreciated his work were obliged to seek him out in his studio. Nevertheless, in the course of a few years, such men as Wyatt Eaton, William M. Chase, Richard Watson Gilder, Thomas B. Clarke, Stanford White, Francis Lathrop, John Gellatly, R. U. Johnson, and Sir William Van Horne not only bought his pictures but tried to bring him into popular favor. It was not until 1894 that an adequate loan exhibition of his work was opened at Knoedler's Gallery, New York, when a collection of oil paintings was shown. After the close of this New York exhibition the same collection was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The foreword in the catalogue alluded very justly to his delicate and beautiful sense of color, his poetic feeling, and the suggestiveness of his work. An article in the Critic (March 10, 1894) gave him credit for "that rare and delightful characteristic which we call quality"; and other New York and Boston critics were greatly impressed.
Nevertheless, Newman's name was all but unknown, and he was never financially successful. At the sale of the studio effects of Francis Lathrop after that artist's death a number of Newman's pictures were sold for insignificant prices.
He died in his eighty-fifth year. His death, which may have been accidental, was caused by asphyxiation.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"That Newman was a great colorist in the best sense, is evident in all of his finished work. In all his pictures it is the poetry of color and of life rather than the prose that one finds. " (F. F. Sherman)