About this artist
John Henry Newman was an English theologian and poet, first an Anglican priest and later a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s, and was canonised as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.
Originally an evangelical Oxford University academic and priest in the Church of England, Newman became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became known as a leader of, and an able polemicist for the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial grouping of Anglicans who wished to return to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this, the movement had some success. After publishing his controversial Tract 90 in 1841, Newman later wrote, "I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church". In 1845 Newman, joined by some but not all of his followers, officially left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church.