John Perry Newell (1832-1898)

John Perry Newell was a lithographic artist, publisher, and painter born in Newport, Rhode Island. Newell studied lithography at John H. Bufford’s firm in Boston. He traveled frequently between Newport and Boston and by the mid-1850s he was producing popular drawing of ships and Rhode Island and Massachusetts marine scenes. He found success beginning in the 1870s with his lithographic views of Newport, as well as from his commissions to draw the newly-built mansions of wealthy Newport residents. In the 1860s he had also sketched around Lake Champlain and possibly worked in Brussels some time during the 1870s. He mainly worked independently and published his own prints, though he continued to draw for the firms of Bufford, Endicott & Company, and for Robertson, Seibert & Shearman. He exhibited his work in 1866 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and his work can be found in private and public collections including the Boston Athenaeum; the Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence; and the Andover Historical Society, Massachusetts. In 1882 he moved to England, working as an art critic for several newspapers and continuing to make lithographs. The last fifteen years of his life were spent abroad and he died in Brighton in 1898.