"Gary Monroe has captured the essence of the Highwaymen's spirit through his insightful and endearing portrait of the group's finest painter."--Allison McCarthy, executive director, LeMoyne Art Foundation

Harold Newton was an unrecognized vagabond artist who not only captured the beauty of the Florida landscape but transformed it with an artistry that invoked its drama of light, color, and form while hinting at its dark, primordial forces. One of his fellow Highwaymen once observed of his work, "It don't have to be signed to know it's a Newton." Combining samples of his paintings with biographical details and reminiscences of family members, customers, and fellow Highwaymen, Gary Monroe creates an homage to the man whose work contributed perhaps more than anyone else's to shaping the romantic imagery and identity of modern Florida.

An enigmatic figure, Newton lived an artist's life--aloof and prolific while painting, gregarious and expansive when socializing. Taking to the streets to sell his paintings in 1954, he sold untold numbers of works, showering the state with them. There are "Newtons" everywhere--especially along Florida's east central coast, the Highwaymen's backyard. Their art is in Miami and the Palm Beaches, Tallahassee and across the Panhandle, Lake City and scattered throughout the interior, and along the west coast as well, in Naples, Sarasota, Tampa, and St. Petersburg--wherever there were homes and offices. More of Newton's paintings remain today than those of any of the other highwaymen. Monroe explains these images' enduring appeal while providing glimpses of the African American artist's life from which they emerged, from a childhood spent moving between Florida and south Georgia, to a pivotal encounter with Bean Backus, to his sojourns at Eddie's Place, to the repossession of his 1959 Ford sedan decorated with beach, ocean, palm trees, and nude girls, to the quiet accumulation of professional patrons eager to purchase another two or three "Newtons" at every available opportunity.

Newton is central to understanding the style of landscape painting that emerged from the Indian River area at mid-century, and Monroe creates an attractive, engaging, and informative account of this pivotal artist and his impact on the popular image of Florida....

By now, the story of Florida's Highwaymen - self-trained African American painters whose visions of the state were sold to travelers out of the trunks of their cars - is fairly well known. Emerging in the late 1950s and led by painters such as Alfred Hair and Harold Newton, the Highwaymen produced an astonishing number of landscapes that depict a faraway place of windswept palms, billowing clouds, placid wetlands, and lush sunsets. As demand soared, Al Black (b. 1946) emerged as a salesman par excellence. Often earning thirty-five per cent commission, he learned to paint partly from repairing damaged works that had been loaded into his car while still wet. Inevitably, the boom times went bust, Black struggled with drugs, and eventually went to prison. While in the Central Florida Reception Center, 'Inmate Black' was recognized as painter 'Al Black' after the warden read a story by St. Petersburg Times columnist Jeff Klinkenberg about the Highwaymen. Soon, with the warden's encouragement and permission, Black was painting murals throughout the prison, classic Highwaymen landscapes in unexpected venues. When he left CFRC in 2006, Black had created more than 100 murals for the Department of Corrections. "The Highwaymen Murals" is the only record of these images and a must-have for any connoisseur of their work. This is the latest volume in Gary Monroe's "Highwaymen" trilogy....