Harry Foster Newey was born on 22 September 1858 and studied at Birmingham School of Art in Birmingham, England. By the early 1880s he had moved to Harborne in Staffordshire and in the 1881 England and Wales census gave as his occupation as Artist Designer and Modeller [of] Silver. In 1908 Newey was appointed Principal of Tunstall School of Art in Staffordshire, a post he held until 1908. From the 1880s he worked primarily as a landscape, figure and genre painter. He exhibited extensively at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and was elected an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1913 and a full member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1927. Newey was the author of Elementary Drawing: being a few practical hints for art students and teachers (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd.