Clara Chipman Newton

Clara Chipman Newton
Clara Chipman Newton as painted by Mary Louise McLaughlin
Born	October 26, 1848 Delphos, Ohio, U.S.
Died	December 8, 1936 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
Resting place	Spring Grove Cemetery
Nationality	American
Known for	Painting

Clara Chipman Newton (October 26,1848 – December 8, 1936) was an American artist best known as a painter of porcelain and china.

Born in Delphos, Ohio, Newton was the daughter of S.C. Newton, a Vermont merchant who moved his family to Cincinnati in 1852. She attended Miss Appleton's Private School for Girls from 1863-65. When her father died in 1871 and her stepmother moved to Denver, Colorado, Newton chose to stay in Ohio.

In the early 1870s, she attended the School of Design of the University of Cincinnati, where she studied wood-carving and china painting with Benn Pitman. In addition to her artistic abilities, Newton was noted among friends and colleagues for her exceptional memory, business acumen, vivid turns of phrase, and distinctive handwriting.

Newton exhibited her china painting at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and in 1879 she became one of the founding members and the secretary of the Cincinnati Pottery Club along with Mary Louise McLaughlin, who was to become a close friend. For more than a decade, beginning with its founding in 1880, she worked at Maria Longworth Nichols Storer's Rookwood Pottery, as a china decorator, archivist, and general assistant with the title of secretary. She shared with Storer responsibility for overseeing the decoration and glazing, and beginning in 1881 she taught classes in overglaze painting at Rookwood's new pottery school. Newton was thus deeply involved with two of the institutions—the Cincinnati Pottery Club and Rookwood—that are most closely associated with the American art pottery movement of the late 19th century

For the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Newton played an important role in helping to organize the Cincinnati Room in the Woman's Building. Newton was put in charge of arranging all of the exhibits in the Cincinnati Room, some 280 objects altogether—a quarter of them made by Newton's friend and mentor McLaughlin— ranging from ceramics, paintings, sculpture, and woodcarving to needlework and books.