painter, caricaturist, illustrator, journalist and publican, came to Sydney from England at the end of 1841 bringing animal paintings with him. They were favourably reviewed in the Sydney Gazette , which recommended inspection of his studio in Bridge Street, 'which we are sure from the faithfulness of his portraits will be universally patronized’. Heads of the People listed Newall among Sydney’s artistic core in 1847, when he was working from Hutcheson Street, Surry Hills. A Favourite Horse , lent by Captain Archibald Innes (uncle of Annabella Boswell ) to the 1849 exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia was generally admired. In September 1849 Newall advertised a solo exhibition of his pictures at Darlinghurst Court House. He built up a considerable local reputation as a painter of animals and game.
A great sportsman, Newall was associated with a lively crowd of hoteliers and sporting men at O’Brien’s (later Tattersall’s) Hotel, Pitt Street, in the 1860s. For his game paintings he would first 'bag’ his subjects then consign them to canvas. In about August 1850 he returned from an excursion to the Hawkesbury and upper Colo rivers with more visual evidence of his sporting and artistic prowess, including Dead Opossum and Moor Hens , The Nankeen Crane , Snaring the Wourang and two small paintings of The Rosella and Lowrie parrots. The last was described as 'faithful representations of the hues of those beautiful birds’. Australian Fish , a Newall painting lent to the 1857 Fine Art Exhibition at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts by J. Nichols, was evidently the painting that was reviewed by Bell’s Life in Sydney on 19 October 1850 after George Robert Nichols M.L.C. had purchased it. The review stated:
The subject is a group of fish, consisting of Snapper, Nanagi, small Mullet, and Guard fish; the whole are admirably disposed, being thrown together loosely and naturally; and the colour and drawing are of a very high order. The silvery grey of the guard fish is beautifully opposed to the rich colouring of the nanagi and the snapper, each receiving value from the other. The head of the farthest fish is transparent and pearly in the extreme. All the adjuncts of the picture are in admirable keeping, and upon the whole, we conceive this picture to be one of Mr. Newall’s happiest achievements.
[cf J.F. Lewin, Fish Catch & Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour c.1813 AGSA, comprising from top: snapper, hammerhead shark (largely hidden), crimson squirrel-fish, estuary perch (tail wrongly represented – should be forked), rainbow wrasse and sea mullet. Ron Radford in Australian Colonial Art 1800-1900 , AGSA, claims the fish relate to a group of 21 pencil & w/c drawings by Lewin given to the Linnean Society, London, in 1821]
In 1850 Newall’s Game to the Bone was offered as tenth prize in Grocott’s third art union in Sydney. In 1859 he painted the renowned racehorse Eclipse from an original engraving published in 1796. It was displayed in the Metropolitan Hotel where, Forde states, Newall had the whole of the interior 'covered over with pencil sketches’. In 1863 he decorated the interior of Wells’s Royal Hotel on the North Shore with copies and original works. Forde also mentions that Newall began the Empire newspaper with (Sir) Henry Parkes, Newall being responsible for finding the money and at one stage returning to England to raise further capital. Newall was the shipping reporter soon after the Empire began publication in 1851 and was still listed as a reporter in 1854. In January 1863 the Sydney Morning Herald stated that he had been 'for many years connected with the press of this colony’.
Also a talented caricaturist and sketcher, Tom Newall worked with Thomas Balcombe as an illustrator on the short-lived Judy’s Journal , edited by R. Johnson and published in Sydney by Alonzo Grocott, the engraver and printer brother of the art dealer James Grocott. The paper was described in the announcement of its first issue in January 1851 as 'an Illustrated Gazette of Sydney Comicalities and Prodigies, Social and Political’ to contain at least 20 wood-engravings in each issue 'delineating local eccentricities and absurdities’; no extant copy is known.
Newall and Balcombe had a lengthy association doubtless encouraged by a shared interest in the turf as well as in painting animal and Aboriginal subjects. In 1847 they had been among the painters working under the direction of Andrew Torning on the Shakspere Saloon in Pitt Street, creating an elaborate decoration of 12 panels of Shakespearian characters bordered by flowers and scrolls. (A copy of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Kemble as Hamlet was considered the best of them, its painter unidentified.) 12 years later Newall and Balcombe were still in harness, Newall’s 1859 oil painting on patent millboard having been developed from Balcombe’s sketch of an Aboriginal woman 'from one of the distant coastal tribes’ shown wading through a shallow creek at sunset carrying water in a coolamon. Although the resulting painting was judged highly successful, it cannot have led to many sales. The following year, on 17 August 1860, Thomas Newall, artist of New South Head Road, was declared insolvent.
In January 1863 Newall returned from a trip to the South Seas where he had been sketching islands said to have been previously undocumented. A moonlight scene of 'Rotuma’ was favourably noticed in Bell’s Life , as was a pencil view of a Fijian mission house described as being 'rich in tone and effect’. Most of these drawings were in pencil, those on tinted paper being described as 'highly finished’. Newall appears to have been looking for a patron to sponsor their publication as lithographs, but apparently without success. Two of his transparencies were among Sydney’s street decorations celebrating the marriage of the Prince of Wales in June. Portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales decorated one façade of Robinson’s premises at the corner of William and Palmer Streets, their respective coats of arms the other. The auctioneer Saul Lyons showed Newall’s Brace of Snipe non-competitively at the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition.
Tom Newall was a renowned marksman. Forde states that he bet a case of champagne that he could shoot the ear off Charles Pickering 's carved sandstone kangaroo on the hill overlooking Manly beach and did it in one shot. (A Mr Bagnall is credited with having shot off the second ear, also to win a bet.) As an artist, he seems to have been popular and prolific and it is unfortunate that so few of his works have been identified. The Mitchell Library holds his painting of an Aboriginal family, a work stylistically similar to Balcombe’s, and a harbourside pencil sketch.
Forde vaguely recollected that Newall had married 'a sister of Bill Piesley’s wife’. They had at least two sons, Bill and Charles, the latter a well-known businessman and alderman in the Neutral Bay-Mosman area. One son was born in May 1855 at their residence on Old South Head Road – presumably the South Head Hotel, which Newall owned and where the family apparently lived until his bankruptcy.
- Writers:
- Lennon, Jane
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
