Ernest Lawson

Background

Ernest Lawson was the son of Archibald Lawson, a physician, and Anna E. (Mitchell) Lawson. They had been born and married in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but Ernest was born in San Francisco, where his parents were then visiting. They later settled in the United States. Ernest spent his boyhood in Kansas City, Missouri.

Education

In 1888 in Kansas City he received his first art instruction: lessons in stippling designs on cloth given by a traveling salesman. In 1889 he went to Mexico City, where his father had gone as physician for an English construction firm. There Lawson worked as an assistant draftsman and for one month attended a night class in drawing at the San Carlos Academy; the instruction consisted of tracing and stippling. Intent on further art study, he saved up enough to go to New York in 1890 and entered the Art Students' League, joining the class in cast-drawing taught by John H. Twachtman. He later continued to study with Twachtman and with J. Alden Weir at their Cos Cob, Connecticut summer art school in the 1890s. Lawson visited France in 1893 and studied at the Académie Julian with Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens.

Career

Lawson practiced plein air painting in southern France and at Moret-sur-Loing, where he met the English Impressionist Alfred Sisley. The reward of this self-schooling was the acceptance of a picture of his for the Salon des Artistes Français in 1894, his first to be publicly exhibited anywhere. In that year Lawson returned to the United States. In 1898 he settled at Washington Heights in New York City, a locality that was then still rural and gave Lawson many of the pictorial subjects for his mature style. Lawson became an Associate of the Academy in 1908 and an Academician in 1917. He was among "The Eight, " whose exhibition in 1908 was intended by their leader, Robert Henri, as a rebuke to the National Academy; Lawson was also among those sponsoring the still more upsetting Armory Show of 1913, but for temperamental reasons he took no active part in the controversies resulting from those events.

Lawson's reputation was such that the leading public collections in this country, more than two dozen in number, possessed examples of his work before he died. Yet in the latter years Lawson experienced financial difficulties and prolonged ill health. His life was a roving one for most of the time: France in 1903-1904, New York's MacDougal Alley in 1906, Spain in 1916, New York City again in 1920, Long Island in 1923, and a stay in 1924 at Peggy's Cove, near Halifax, Nova Scotia, whence his parents had come. At that time Mrs. Lawson was living in Egypt.

Lawson's own wanderings continued with teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1928; a trip to France in 1930 to visit his married daughter; a stay in Connecticut in 1932; and one in Florida in 1935. The next year he was in Tennessee for a while, but his last three years were spent in the home of friends in Coral Gables, Florida. His body was found in forty feet of water off Miami Beach on the night of December 18, 1939, and the surrounding circumstances led to a legal verdict of suicide, although this was later questioned by friends. After cremation, his ashes were scattered at sea.

The relatively thick impasto in Lawson's paintings, achieved mainly with the palette knife, became noticeable as early as 1898; his characteristic "jeweled" color appeared by 1905. From 1910 on, his mature manner manifested itself, well described by Elisabeth Luther Cary as "heavy pigments flowing over the canvas like the early enamels, holding fire in their heart". The style was clearly based on impressionism, yet with not only a thicker and smoother impasto but also a non-naturalistic interplay of glowing colors. Whatever the subject--huts along the Harlem River, monumental churches in Spain, country roads and intimate woodlands, dead mining towns in Colorado--the vision is always the same; making full use of appearances, it translates them into a very personal idiom within the general language of paint. Through his last decade, that of the Depression Thirties, Lawson was a survivor in a time which he found artistically uncongenial; but he remained an experimenter within his own stylistic limits. The habitual pigment surface was now sacrificed to rougher and more calligraphic brush-strokes; the habitual tranquillity of his design now broke up into agitation; the subsurface opalescence of color now burst out into what Elizabeth McCausland has described as "his equivalent for the storms of the soul".

Achievements

• Lawson was considered America's greatest landscape painter. He also painted a small number of realistic urban scenes. His painting style was heavily influenced by the art of John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and Alfred Sisley. Though considered an American Impressionist, Lawson falls stylistically between Impressionism and realism. In 1904 he received a silver medal at the St. Louis Exposition, the first of more than fifteen major honors awarded to him through the years. Among these may be mentioned the gold medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco (1915), the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1920), the first prize at the International Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (1921), and eight different medals and prizes at the National Academy of Design (New York).

Works

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  • Conneticut River Scene by Ernest Lawson - 20" x 25" Premium Canvas Print

    (20" x 25" premium canvas print of Conneticut River Scene ...)

  • Country Road To Spuyten by Ernest Lawson, 35x47-Inch Canvas Wall Art

    (This ready to hang, gallery wrapped art piece features a ...)

  • Historic Art Gallery Approaching Storm 1919 by Ernest Lawson Framed Canvas Print 20" x 24" Gold Lined

    (This is a Giclee print reproduction on stretched canvas w...)

  • Historic Art Gallery Windy Day, Bronx River by Ernest Lawson Framed Canvas Print 20" x 24" Dark Gold Gallery

    (This is a Giclee print reproduction on stretched canvas w...)

  • Historic Art Gallery Spring Morning 1913 by Ernest Lawson Framed Canvas Print 16" x 20" Antique Gold Gallery

    (This is a Giclee print reproduction on stretched canvas w...)

  • Historic Art Gallery Twilight in Spain by Ernest Lawson Framed Canvas Print 8" x 10" Gold and Black Gallery

    (This is a Giclee print reproduction on stretched canvas w...)

  • Historic Art Gallery The Brooklyn Bridge 1917 by Ernest Lawson Framed Canvas Print 11" x 14" Bronze Gallery

    (This is a Giclee print reproduction on stretched canvas w...)

  • Historic Art Gallery Ice in The River 1907 by Ernest Lawson Framed Canvas Print 8" x 10" Gold and Black Gallery

    (This is a Giclee print reproduction on stretched canvas w...)

  • Historic Art Gallery May in The Mountains 1919 by Ernest Lawson Framed Canvas Print 16" x 20" Gold and Black Gallery

    (This is a Giclee print reproduction on stretched canvas w...)

  • Historic Art Gallery New England Birches by Ernest Lawson Framed Canvas Print 16" x 20" Ornate Gold Lined

    (This is a Giclee print reproduction on stretched canvas w...)

Connections

On November 7, 1894 Lawson married Ella Holman, an artist, in Philadelphia. They had two daughters, Margaret and Dorothy.

Father:

Archibald Lawson

physician

Mother:

Anna E. (Mitchell) Lawson

Spouse:

Ella Holman

artist

Daughter:

Dorothy Lawson

Daughter:

Margaret Lawson

References

• Ernest Lawson, 1873-1939: A retrospective exhibition of his paintings, held at the University of Arizona, Museum of Art, February 11-March 8, 1979 : essay and catalogue
• Ernest Lawson Canadian-American
• Ernest Lawson (American Artists Series, Whitney Museum of American Art)
• Ernest Lawson, American impressionist 1873-1939,
• Ernest Lawson