Richard Newton (caricaturist)


Richard Newton was an English caricaturist, miniaturist and book illustrator.
This short-lived but brilliant 18th-century artist published his first caricature at thirteen. His work included definitive caricatures expressing the English prejudice of the Scots as lean and hungry opportunists. He worked for radical publisher William Holland, producing powerful anti-slavery works among his output, as well as "rude assaults" against Napoleon and the Royal Family. Newton minded Holland's shop when Holland was imprisoned for sedition during 1793–94. His watercolour of fashionably dressed Londoners looking at prints in Holland's shop in Oxford Street, London gives a lively depiction of an 18th print shop and images of many of Holland's actual prints can be recognized on the walls.. In 1794 Holland published an edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy with twelve plates by Newton.
Newton produced nearly 300 single sheet prints of which the British Museum's collection includes more than half. M. D. George's Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum lists 98 prints by Newton
Newton died of typhus at the age of 21. )

Books illustrated by Richard Newton