Amanda Almira Newton carried the weight of a famous name throughout her life. Born around 1860, she was the granddaughter of Isaac Newton, the Quaker farmer from New Jersey who had become Abraham Lincoln’s choice as the first Commissioner of Agriculture in 1862. Yet when Isaac died in June 1867, Amanda was just a child of seven, left with only fragments of memory and a sense of family legacy that would shape her entire career.
Growing up in the shadow of her grandfather’s achievements, Amanda found her own path to agricultural service through art. In 1896, in her mid-30s, she joined the USDA as a botanical illustrator, three years after Deborah Griscom Passmore, who would become known as the collection’s most celebrated artist. But where Passmore commanded attention with her virtuosic technique of layering up to a hundred washes to achieve perfect translucency, Amanda developed her own distinctive approach. Her watercolors were precise and detailed, combining vigorous lines with subtle color modulations that captured not just the appearance but the essence of each fruit. She signed her work simply “A.A. Newton,” a modest mark for what would become an extraordinary body of work.
From the beginning, Amanda demonstrated remarkable innovation. In her first year at the USDA, she pioneered the creation of wax fruit models, becoming the first in the department to develop this technique. These were scientifically accurate three-dimensional representations that matched the weight, texture, and appearance of real fruit, complete with any blemishes or disease effects present in the original specimens. She would go on to create approximately three hundred of these models over her career, displaying them at major expositions including the Tennessee Centennial Exposition and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, where she demonstrated how environmental conditions, cultivation practices, and storage methods affected fruit quality and longevity.
The heart of Amanda’s work lay in her watercolors. Over her thirty-two-year career, she would create more than 1200 finished paintings, making her the second-most prolific contributor to the USDA’s Pomological Watercolor Collection. While apples formed the core of her work, her range extended far beyond. She documented strawberries with their delicate foliage, plums with their waxy bloom, citrus fruits from common oranges to exotic tangors, persimmons, avocados, cherries, and peaches. She even painted fruits rarely seen in continental America: loquats, baobabs, mangoes, guavas, Japanese apricots, custard apples, and yellow sapotes.
Despite her professional achievements, remarkably little was recorded about Amanda’s personal life. She never married, or if she did, no record survives. No documentation exists of her education or artistic training, her home life, her interests outside work, or her personality. What we do know comes through her professional relationships. She developed a particularly meaningful connection with Royal Charles Steadman, who joined the USDA in 1915. Their friendship was close enough that Amanda asked him to paint a portrait of her grandfather Isaac Newton.
This connection to her grandfather remained strong throughout her life. In 1926, at age 66 and near the end of her career, Amanda wrote a biographical piece about Isaac Newton titled simply “Isaac Newton, first United States Commissioner of Agriculture,” signing it “by Amanda Almira Newton (A granddaughter).”
Amanda worked steadily at the USDA until 1928, retiring after thirty-two years of service. She lived another fifteen years, passing away in 1943. During her lifetime, she saw American agriculture transform from regional farming to industrial production, witnessed the rise of commercial fruit cultivation across the continent, and contributed to documenting varieties that would feed a growing nation. Many of the cultivars she painted no longer exist, making her watercolors the only visual record of America’s pomological diversity during a crucial period of agricultural expansion.
