[4] 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.

[3] 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.

[3] Newton did not have independent means, so to supplement her work at Rookwood she opened her own studio in downtown Cincinnati in 1885 and around the same time took a part-time job as a teacher at the Thane Miller School.

[3][4] In 1906, Newton provided a group of watercolor decorations for an edition of Oscar Wilde's Poems in Prose that was published in Thomas Bird Mosher's "Ideal Series of Little Masterpieces" (Vol.