H.E.M. Newman - Artist and Poet

My father made no claim to be much of an artist or a poet. In fact I never cared much for his paintings, and he cared less for his poetry. Nevertheless, he had talent in both forms of artistic expression and I am particularly impressed with a booklet of caricatures of his army colleagues which he produced in 1925 (see below).

As to his poetry, I have two copies of a small book of poems that he had published in his (Indian army) printing shop. In later life, he cringed whenever anyone mentioned the book, regarding his work as "sentimental rubbbish". He hated sentimentality in any form, especially in musical expression and he never hesitated to tell anyone who was within earshot.

His humorous and life-like caricatures display not only a skill that he never seemed to have developed further, but also a sense of joy in friendships which seems out of character to one who knew him only in his later years. In all his paintings that I ever saw, I never saw a human form; and I summarily disposed of all his latter-day photographic collection because it contained only views (landscapes etc) that were meaningless to me because they were all devoid of human life. I remember in Australia the trouble he always took when taking a photograph of a landscape to make sure there was no-one visible in his view-finder! How he must have changed.

Examples of his artistic work cover three separate pages of this website: