Australian portraitist Paul Newton delights in painting classical style art. His award-winning portraits include well-known Australians and Americans—from politicians and celebrities to captains of industry and Ivy League officials.
Mr. Newton’s most memorable commission came from the grace of “Our Lady.”
In 2008, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney commissioned Mr. Newton’s “Our Lady of the Southern Cross—Help of Christians” painting for Pope Benedict XVI’s officiating World Youth Day in Sydney. In the painting, the Madonna wears a crown of golden wattle, Australia’s national flower. She stands in the Australian outback, gently holding Christ upright in her arms. She gazes tenderly at him, while he gazes out at us. The Crux constellation, commonly known as the Southern Cross, is visible in the southern hemisphere’s sky. Nearly every week, Mr. Newton gets a request to license or reproduce the image.
The Domus Australia Guesthouse in Rome, Italy asked him to create a full-length version of the painting for their chapel, which led to them commissioning a series of paintings commemorating Australia’s Catholic community—his largest commission to date. “That was an extraordinary commission—really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said. “I did 32 paintings and it was a marathon.” A six-year painting marathon.
Every person or group of people he portrayed for the chapel has a direct or symbolic link to Australia. St. Patrick (circa 401–circa 500) and St. Brigid (circa 450–circa 525), for instance, represent Australia’s Irish community, St. Thomas More (1478–1535) and St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) symbolize the country’s English community, and John Bede Polding (1794–1877) was the first Roman Catholic bishop and then the first archbishop of Sydney. He established many religious institutions such as the St. John’s College at The University of Sydney and the Sisters of the Good Samaritan, in Sydney, the country’s first religious congregation.
Painting with Piety
Normally, Mr. Newton paints people in person, so the historical portraits posed a challenge. His Christian faith and experiences growing up with his Anglican father and Irish Catholic mother helped him depict the religious figures and their symbolism. He also researched every avenue he could. “I did spend a lot of time thinking about who these people were, what made them tick.”
Before painting Australia’s first canonized saint, St. Mary the Cross MacKillop (1842–1909), he visited her order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, in Sydney, where the nuns shared her philosophy with him and showed him sepia photographs from the 1800s.
For “Early Catholic Community of Sydney, Circa 1818,” he read anecdotes of an early colonist’s prayer meeting that happened that year in Sydney, and he arranged live models to pose for his composition. In the painting, families gather around a makeshift altar lit with candles. Every person shows a different state of contemplation: some hold rosaries, others hold their hands in prayer, and some smile or gently gaze in awe, humbled at the opportunity to worship. Even the person in the portrait, hanging on the wall, seems to bow his head in prayer. And like many old masters before him, Mr. Newton included himself in the background. (He can be seen in a white shirt and black waistcoat, in the top right-hand corner.)
Another painting shows an imprisoned priest. In 1975, the Vietnamese communist regime imprisoned the then-coadjutant archbishop of Saigon, Francis-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan (1928–2002) for 13 years, including nine years of solitary confinement.
Mr. Newton wanted to show Thuan serving in the oppressive environment without compromising his beliefs. “It would have been tremendously difficult [for him]—talk about heroic virtuosity,” he said. Despite being behind bars, he made a makeshift bible, and his sympathizers snuck out his written reflections and prayers, which were read worldwide as “Prayers of Hope, Words of Courage” and “The Road of Hope: Thoughts of Light from a Prison Cell.”
Mr. Newton interviewed a Vietnamese priest who had also been imprisoned and who knew the archbishop. He described the conditions that he had endured and how he felt, helping Mr. Newton recreate the scene.
He depicted Thuan kneeling, performing holy communion, in a dank and squalid prison cell wearing black trousers and a ripped t-shirt. Sunlight casts a cross-shaped shadow through the cell’s window bars onto the wall, symbolizing Thuan’s unwavering faith. And a small bird flies heavenwards, a sign of Thuan’s spirit rising above adversity.
Pope Benedict XVI referred to Thuan’s “Prayers of Hope” in his 2007 encyclical “Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope)”: “During thirteen years in jail, in a situation of seemingly utter hopelessness, the fact that he could listen and speak to God became for him an increasing power of hope, which enabled him, after his release, to become for people all over the world a witness to hope—to that great hope which does not wane even in the nights of solitude.”
