HUGH NEWELL

Portrait, genre, and landscape painter Hugh Newell was born near Belfast, Ireland in 1830. Newell studied at the Antwerp Academy, with Thomas Couture in Paris, and at the South Kensington Museum in London. He immigrated to the United States around 1851, and worked in Baltimore, Maryland, and Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, before settling in Bloomfield, New Jersey. In Baltimore he was head of the Maryland Institute of Art and Design and was a professor of drawing at Johns Hopkins University. In Pittsburgh he held the position of Principal of the School of Design for Women from 1870 to about 1878. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society. Newell’s work was exhibited at: the Maryland Historical Society; the Washington Art Association; the National Academy of Design; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Art Association; the Boston Art Club; and the Art Institute of Chicago. He died in Bloomfield, New Jersey in 1915. His works are held among the collections of the Peabody Institute, and the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania; the Shelburne Museum in Vermont; the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland; and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.