Career
But even while engaged in lace-making he continued to find time for art, and used to paint small pictures, which he sold at first for about half-a-crown each. In 1835 he gave up the lace trade and set up as an artist, his earliest patron being a hairdresser in Nottingham, who possessed a taste for art In 1849 he came with his family to London, and settled at Croydon, where some of his best pictures were painted.
Among these may be reckoned "The Wooden Walls of Old England," exhibited at the British Institution in 1853, "The Rainbow," "The Rainbow at Sea," "London Bridge," and " London at Sunrise."
With the exception of six lessons from Pyne received in 1838, Henry Dawson was entirely a self-taught artist, and his art shows much originality and careful realism.
He studied nature for himself, but he seems in later life to have been moved by Turner"s influence to try more brilliant effects than he had before dared. This exhibition showed him to be a genuine English landscape painter, of no great imaginative or intellectual power, but who delighted in nature, and represented her faithfully to the best of his ability.
He died in December 1878, at Chiswick, where he had for some time resided.
