Design and Art Australia Online

painter, china painter and potter, was born in Tumut, New South Wales, where her father ran the local store. The family lived at The Lawns, a property Robert Newman had inherited. In 1893 Ada enrolled at the Sydney Technical College and three years later was touring England and Europe painting watercolour scenes of the places visited. After she returned home, the family moved to Sydney. By 1906 Ada was studying china-painting at the Tech. with J.A. Peach. Her china-painting was included in the 1907 Women’s Work Exhibition, both at Melbourne and in the preliminary Sydney show.

With Dorothy Wilson and about half a dozen others, Ada Newman was a founding member of the Arts and Crafts Society of NSW in August 1906, and she exhibited regularly with it until 1941. She also exhibited with the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria in 1919 and with the Women’s Industrial Arts Society (formerly the Society of Women Painters) at Sydney in the 1930s. Until 1910 she had 'a little studio in Pitt-street where she worked and taught’. By 1914, mainly through private commissions, she was able to set up a studio in Hunter Street where she taught china painting. Ethel Atkinson joined her there about 1916 in what was to be a lifelong partnership. Fervent believers in national design and materials, they began making their own pottery in the 1920s, nearly all decorated with Australian motifs. At the Society’s 1929 annual exhibition, for instance, Ada’s china painting exhibits included a coffee set in rich browns with a native flower design in rich blue ( Sun 24 October 1929) and a 'tall straight brown vase with a design of seed pods of Australian shrubs’ (anon cuttings file). In the 1920s she also painted medallions, which Rhoda Wager (another member of the Society) made into silver framed brooches.

As well as taking students in pottery at their 'Ceramic Art Studio’, Newman and Atkinson fired work for other potters in their gas and electric kilns. A photograph of Ada with her students was published in Woman’s World in May 1931. After Ada’s father died at the age of ninety-six (c.1940) she and Atkinson moved into the Newman home in Muston Street, Mosman, and installed kilns for both china painting and pottery. Newman died in 1949, whereupon Atkinson abandoned both pottery and china painting.

Vase with Epacris Design was purchased by the Trustees of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales from the 1925 exhibition of the NSW Society of Arts & Crafts. It was the ninth and final example of Ada Newman’s china painting to enter the collection. Over twenty years earlier the trustees had made their first purchase of a jug and a vase, both painted with native flowers, either from the 1910 Arts & Crafts Society exhibition or from the 1912 Girls’ Realm Guild Exhibition (the records are unclear). The other Newman acquisitions were all from previous Arts & Crafts Society exhibitions too: a beautiful art nouveau lustre vase with a landscape design, which cost the gallery five guineas in 1913; a jardiniere with a butterfly design and two vases-one with a grape and the other with a poplar design-acquired 1914; a blue vase with a seed-pod design and a six-piece morning glory (Convolvulus) tea set purchased 1920. All were painted on imported blanks, either of French or English china, French being preferred because the harder glaze was better able to withstand Newman’s multiple firings.

Newman was not particularly impressed by the gallery’s exceptional patronage of her work, commenting in an interview in 1924 that when working on her tea set The Morning Glory she had always pictured 'a beautifully set tray and someone enjoying tea from the lovely cups; but “they will be forever cold”’. Nor were the examples it acquired particularly outstanding. Her blue-painted china, nicknamed 'The Newman Blue’ in local Arts & Crafts circles, was highly praised in the Connoisseur when she showed a blue coffee set decorated with wattle in London, but the only gallery piece with a blue ground is her seed-pod vase – a paler example. As early as 1907, at the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work in Melbourne, Newman had shown a set of dessert plates in which both her blues and her love of native flowers were evident. The Sydney Mail commented:

In the competitive china painting there is a fine display, a set of dessert plates by Miss A. Newman being actual works of high art. A starlike border of pale blue has a small interlacing of a deeper shade, whilst on each plate is a wreath of native blossoms, exquisitely painted, the wonga, dillwynia, wattle, ti-tree flower, hardenbergia, and epacris (Christmas bush) forming the series.

Such special pieces were apparently snapped up by private collectors as soon as they left the kiln or were done on commission. They were, of course, also more expensive than her simpler china paintings. 'Craft’ was an area in which the National Art Gallery of NSW was equivocal about collecting at all and under Director J.S. McDonald in 1934, it was happily abandoned to the Technological (now Powerhouse) Museum – the year the Powerhouse acquired its first Newman piece.

The last Newman acquisition by the AGNSW, acquired 1925, was a vase decorated with an Australian flower, the Epacris or native heath, painted on a French blank. Yet by 1925 Newman and her partner Ethel Atkinson were making their own pottery. This piece, however, only seems atypical because it was made about twenty years earlier, probably in 1895. A label on the back states it was in the 'Art Loan Exhibition 1897’, an exhibition of Sydney Technical College students’ work at the Art Gallery, but Newman went on her Grand Tour in 1896 and must have made it before she left. As an example of her student work, it is an excellent if unsophisticated piece prefiguring the passionate nationalism she brought to her pottery designs when working with Atkinson in later years. As reported in 1924, Ada Newman 'instituted a distinctly Australian school, and one that has awakened interest and admiration abroad’- abroad being the magical word that may well have inspired the gallery to make this conservative yet 'distinctly Australian’ purchase from the following year’s exhibition.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992