Algernon Cecil Newton was a British painter active in the early to mid 20th century. Newton is known for his cityscapes with canal fronting buildings and landscapes of open hills and isolated trees.

Newton’s approach, with stark contrasts of value and texture, evokes stillness and perhaps even a suspension of time, giving his paintings a magic realist quality. A number of his cityscapes feature canals with reflections of buildings in them; and he was sometimes referred to as the “Canaletto of the canals”.

Algernon Newton’s grandfather, Henry Newton, was the founding “Newton” of the art materials manufacturer Winsor & Newton. Algernon Newton found little success until late in his career, though he is now considered a significant figure in 20th century British art.

Active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ivan Pavlovitch Pokhitonov was a Russian/Ukrainian painter who spent the greater part of his career living and working in France and Belgium.

Though he also painted portraits and still life, he is noted for his landscapes. Influenced by the French and Belgian painters around him, Pokhitonov’s landscapes took on qualities that had critics referring to him as the “Russian Barbizon painter”.

Aside from some classes in drawing and watercolor during studies of other subjects at Odessa University, and a stint working for French Symbolist painter Eugène Carriè, Pokhitonov was largely self-taught.

Most remarkable, perhaps, after seeing reproductions of Pokhitonov’s paintings, is the realization that they are essentially miniatures. Rather than being 30 x 40 inches or larger, as I might have assumed, it appears that most of them are in the range of 6 x 10 inches (15 x 25 cm).

Pokhitonov worked on his small paintings with unorthodox tools, reportedly using magnifiers, scalpels, fishbones and other objects to enable small marks and textural effects. A number of his works are “cinematic” in aspect ratio, and many feature prominent horizons that might threaten to divide the canvas in two vertically, but are always kept in check in the context of his artfully balanced compositions.

Many of his contemporaries were impressed with his naturalism and painting skill, some even referring to him as a “sorcerer” or “magician”.

Russian great Ilya Repin, after slogging disappointedly through the 1894 Paris Salon, remarked that his only pleasure after “all this torture and wandering through endless exhibition rooms was the opportunity to have a rest in front of the miniature gems of our I.P. Pokhitonov”.

Thomas Edwin Mostyn was a British painter active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Though he also painted portraits, figures and landscapes of specific locations, he is known primarily for his invented landscapes of idyllic gardens.

These were often painted with high chroma passages, broken color and short brush stokes in the Impressionist manner.