How Algernon Newton made great art out of empty streets and dingy canals

Quite late in life Walter Sickert paid his first visit to Peckham Rye. He was excited, apparently, because he had often heard about it but never actually been there. Evidently Sickert had a sense of London as an unknown city, full of potential. And he was far from being the only artist fascinated by the hidden recesses of this vast urban labyrinth. Algernon Newton, another case in point, was equally fascinated by unfashionable byways of the metropolis.

For Sickert it was music halls and dingy bedrooms in Camden that seemed full of visual possibilities; for Newton it was terraced streets and urban water courses, their banks empty of people. Not for nothing was he dubbed ‘the Regent Canaletto’. A series of his paintings from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s follows the course of the Regent’s Canal as it passes through Maida Vale and Paddington.

Superficially at least, Newton (1880–1968) seems a prime example of an artist out of step with his time.