Newton Merrill, A Florida Shore, oil on canvas, 27 by 33 inches. Signed lower left.
Newton Merrill had talents both as an artist and an actor. In 1908, at the age of 28, actor Merrill appeared on Broadway in the all-star cast of The Blue Mouse. Artist Merrill and his wife Marjorie lived abroad in London and on the Riviera in the south of France at Menton for over twenty-five years. With the onset of World War I, Merrill enlisted as a hospital attendant in the French Army and when the United States entered the war, he joined the American Expeditionary Force. While abroad his paintings were exhibited in Nice, Geneva, and London. Like many American artists and writers living in Europe, Merrill returned to the States with the deepening Depression to exhibits of his work in Hartford and Old Lyme, Connecticut, San Diego, and Cleveland.
Newton Merrill, oil on canvas, 30 by 25 inches. Signed lower left.
In 1935 the couple moved to Orlando and Fern Park where Merrill once again used his acting talent to join English born actress Annie Russell who, after a long career on the stage in New York City, had joined the Rollins College faculty in Winter Park as Professor of Theater Arts at the Annie Russell Theatre on campus at Rollins. Here Merrill designed scenery, stage sets and played leading roles in productions such as A. A. Milne’s The Romantic Age and Noel Coward’s Hands Across the Sea.
Newton Merrill, a Mexican scene, oil on canvas, 25 by 30 inches. Signed lower right.
Merrill, with a studio and home in Fern Park, just north of Maitland and Winter Park, conducted weekly art course in Winter Park. In 1941 he was appointed by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. as chairman of the a “Bowl of Rice” benefit on behalf of the American Bureau for Medical Aid for China, a benefit held at Winter Park High School auditorium.
In 1957 Merrill moved to a studio-home on Chase Avenue in Winter Park, near Lake Osceola. An artist with a distinctly conservative ideas, Merrill, like many artists of his time, preferred flower portraits and landscapes. In 1938, a few years before the New York School of Abstract Expressionism became famous, he was quoted by the Orlando Sentinel, “Too many artist paint pictures without considering the psychology of their buyers. They put out strikingly fantastic pieces–good for museums but not at all livable…many so called ultra-modern daubers use colors that are too vivid and exciting to fit nicely into the average home.” * With his genius as actor, artist, had Merrill been born a few years later, fate might have brought him, not to Broadway, but to Greenwich Village along with de Kooning and Pollack.
Born: 1884, Richfield Springs, New York. Died: December 27, 1963, Winter Park, Florida. Education: In New York; In France with Madame Alice Muth; in Hartford, Old Lyme, and Westfield, Connecticut. Exhibits: Miami Women’s Club, 7th Annual Exhibit, February 1935; Miami Beach Art Center, 1st exhibit at the Miami Beach Public Library, April 1935, Gladioli; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, December 1938, nine paintings of Mexico and twelve landscape and flower paintings: Casa Iberia, Rollins College, Mexican painting, April 1947; Orlando Women’s Club, January 1949, one-man exhibit of landscape and flower paintings.
*Orlando Sentinel, November 27, 1938.
