Newton was born in Hampstead in 1880, a grandson of Henry Newton, one of the founders of the Winsor & Newton the art materials company. Early in World War I, Newton held the rank of Sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Later, he served with the Army and was invalided out in 1916 after catching pneumonia, recuperating over the next few years among the artist community at Lamorna, Cornwall. In 1919 he returned to London and started exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Art. In the 1920s, he also regularly exhibited at the New English Art Club. He was elected ARA (Associate Royal Academician) in 1936, and a full RA in 1943. His Evening on the Avon was commissioned for the Long Gallery of the RMS Queen Mary. A number of his paintings are in Art Galleries in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States – notably in the Tate Britain. In 2011 the Metropolitan Museum, New York acquired his painting Stormy Sunset on the East Coast (1939). His obituary in The Times described him as "a painter of quiet distinction ... He could take the most forbidding canal or group of factory buildings and, without romanticizing or shrinking any detail, create a poetic and restful composition out of it." He himself once wrote: "There is beauty to be found in everything, you only have to search for it; a gasometer can make as beautiful a picture as a palace on the Grand Canal, Venice. It simply depends on the artist's vision." His auction record is £128,500, set at Bonham's on 10 June 2015 for his oil City of London from Hampstead Heath (1949). Modern British and Irish Art sale, Bonham's, 10 June 2015. A catalogue raisonné of Newton's work is being prepared by his great grandson, Sir Mark Jones.