Excerpt from Peter Newell's Pictures and Rhymes

There was little in the early days upon the farm that gave evidence of what was in store for the young Newell, except that there was hardly any work to be done on the parental acres that seemed suited to his abilities. He was an indifferent milker; a somewhat tentative tosser of hay; and it is said that his ploughing lacked depth. However all this may be, long before the years of discretion had been reached it was quite evident to those who watched him and speculated upon his future career that in the poetry of life the bucolic caesura was not to be Mr. Newell's division. And a little later the ease and avidity with which he seized upon the paint-pot, and the grace with which he manipulated the brush in the painting of campaign banners and the making of patent drawings, gave promise of an artistic career that must have either greatly encouraged or greatly worried those who had the care of him. It is told of an eminent sculptor that the first indications of his genius manifested themselves in the turning of a last in a shoe-shop. It is no less interesting to know that in the handling of pigments Mr. Newell's earliest experiments were on barn-doors and wagon-wheels.

His education was wholly in the public schools, and it is probably true that it was acquired with some difficulty, since Mr. Newell developed, as time went on, a certain dexterity in the caricaturing of his teachers. Many an excellent specimen of his workin black and white has been rubbed hastily from a school black-board by an irate teacher; and it is a cause of positive grief to certain collectors of his pictures to think of the ruthless wet thumb that obliterated Mr. Newell's slate impressions of those who were trying to teach him something he never knew before. Yet the artist acknowledges that the personal criticism that was laid on at such times by his unconscious models has done him much good from the point of view of morals, if not from that of his art. Discipline is not usually taught in art-schools, but out of his art tendencies Mr. Newell acquired a knowledge of the power of authority which has helped to make of him a good citizen.

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