Muriel E. Newton-White was born, raised, and lived a good part of her life in Haileybury. She spent her days capturing the beauty of northern Ontario in paint, pencil, and ink.

Well-known locally for her children’s books and internationally renowned for her delightfully amusing Backhouses of the North, selling over 100,000 copies, Muriel was also a skilled painter, trained at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) by members and contemporaries of the Group of Seven. She worked in oil, watercolour, egg tempera, and India ink.

Northern landscapes were by far her most common and favourite subject – with flowers a close second.

Streetcar Childhood

Muriel Elizabeth Newton-White was born in a streetcar in Robillard Township, near Charlton in Northeastern Ontario, to Gladys (nee Attwater) and Ernest Newton-White.

Gladys and Ernest arrived in Canada from England with their respective families around 1910, and married in 1919. Like many others who found themselves homeless after the Great Fire of 1922, the Newton-Whites lived in one of the relocated Toronto streetcars that had been sent north for temporary emergency housing.

The streetcar was placed on the Attwater family farm, to a spot Muriel later described as “a small piece of land in the middle of a sheep pasture.” From here, they headed to Lorrain Valley and built a log cabin nestled amongst the trees, overlooking Lake Temiskaming. The land and cabin later became part of Camp Lorrain.

By 1927, Ernest, Gladys, and their first-born, two-year-old Ralph, had moved back into the streetcar on the farm. It was here, blowing in with the cold winds of winter in January 1928, that Muriel was born. Over the years, her father added to the length of the streetcar; it would remain 8 feet wide, but eventually grew to be 40 feet long. Muriel had several years of ill health as a child, and would spend hours looking out the streetcar windows, imagining lying low with magical field fairies and flying high with the birds.

Muriel chronicles her streetcar childhood in a beautifully written trilogy that begins, as she did, with The Cold Wind in Winter. The books are replete with touching family photographs and enchanting drawings done by a very young Muriel.

The Artist

At the age of 15, Muriel was awarded a scholarship to the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) in Toronto, Ontario, where she was trained by members of Canada’s Group of Seven.  In 1949, Muriel E. Newton-White graduated with her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and returned to her place of comfort and home in the north.

For Muriel E. Newton-White, never a day went by without painting or drawing – usually outdoors.  She was integral to the community, giving art classes, making greeting cards for church fundraisers, creating murals, and painting northern landscapes and homesteads for friends and family.

Over the course of her 60-year career as a professional artist, Muriel E. Newton-White wrote and illustrated 25 books; her paintings now hang in private, corporate, and government collections across the globe.

1928–2011