Ernest Lawson (March 22, 1873 – December 18, 1939) was a
Canadian-American
Canadian Americans is a term that can be applied to American citizens whose ancestry is wholly or partly Canadian, or citizens of either country that hold dual citizenship.
The term ''Canadian'' can mean a nationality or an ethnicity. Canadians ...
painter and exhibited his work at the
Canadian Art Club
The Canadian Art Club was an artists' group established in Toronto in 1907 to advance the standards of Canadian art exhibitions and to exhibit the work of distinguished Canadian artists, particularly those who had studied abroad or lived there. It ...
and as a member of the American group
The Eight, artists who formed a loose association in 1908 to protest the narrowness of taste and restrictive exhibition policies of the conservative, powerful
National Academy of Design
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fin ...
. Though Lawson was primarily a landscape painter, he also painted a small number of realistic urban scenes. His painting style is heavily influenced by the art of
John Henry Twachtman
John Henry Twachtman (August 4, 1853 – August 8, 1902) was an American painter best known for his impressionist landscapes, though his painting style varied widely through his career. Art historians consider Twachtman's style of American Impr ...
,
J. Alden Weir, and
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley (; ; 30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899) was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedicatio ...
. Though considered a Canadian-American Impressionist, Lawson falls stylistically between Impressionism and realism.
Youth
Ernest Lawson was born in 1873 in
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Halifax is the capital and largest municipality of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and the largest municipality in Atlantic Canada. As of the 2021 Census, the municipal population was 439,819, with 348,634 people in its urban area. The ...
to a
prominent family, and arrived in the United States in 1888 and settled in Kansas City. In 1891, he went to live in New York and enrolled in classes at the
Art Students League
The Art Students League of New York is an art school at American Fine Arts Society, 215 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists ...
, studying under
John Twachtman
John Henry Twachtman (August 4, 1853 – August 8, 1902) was an American painter best known for his impressionist landscapes, though his painting style varied widely through his career. Art historians consider Twachtman's style of American Impr ...
, who introduced him to
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open Composition (visual arts), composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating ...
and was the central influence of his formative years. He later continued to study with Twachtman and with J. Alden Weir at their Cos Cob, Connecticut summer art school in the 1890s. "To some degree," one art historian has noted, "Lawson was a product of the art colony movement." Lawson visited France in 1893 and studied at the
Académie Julian
The Académie Julian () was a private art school for painting and sculpture founded in Paris, France, in 1867 by French painter and teacher Rodolphe Julian (1839–1907) that was active from 1868 through 1968. It remained famous for the number a ...
with
Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant
Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (also known as Benjamin-Constant), born Jean-Joseph Constant (10 June 1845 – 26 May 1902), was a French painter and etcher best known for his Oriental subjects and portraits.
Biography
Benjamin-Constant was bor ...
and
Jean-Paul Laurens
Jean-Paul Laurens (; 28 March 1838 – 23 March 1921) was a French painter and sculptor, and one of the last major exponents of the French Academic style.
Biography
Laurens was born in Fourquevaux and was a pupil of Léon Cogniet and Alexand ...
. He practiced ''
plein air
''En plein air'' (; French for 'outdoors'), or ''plein air'' painting, is the act of painting outdoors.
This method contrasts with studio painting or academic rules that might create a predetermined look. The theory of 'En plein air' painting ...
'' painting in southern France and at
Moret-sur-Loing
Moret-sur-Loing (, literally ''Moret on Loing'') is a former commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France. It is situated on the river Loing, close to its confluence with the Seine. Moret–Veneux-l ...
, where he met the English Impressionist
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley (; ; 30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899) was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedicatio ...
. In 1894, Lawson exhibited two paintings in the
Salon
Salon may refer to:
Common meanings
* Beauty salon, a venue for cosmetic treatments
* French term for a drawing room, an architectural space in a home
* Salon (gathering), a meeting for learning or enjoyment
Arts and entertainment
* Salon (P ...
. Lawson shared a Paris studio that year with
W. Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham ( ; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German un ...
, who is believed to have used Lawson as the inspiration for the character "Frederick Lawson" in his 1915 novel ''
Of Human Bondage
''Of Human Bondage'' is a 1915 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. The novel is generally agreed to be Maugham's masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although he stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography; though much in i ...
'' Back in the United States, he married his former art teacher, Ella Holman.
Maturity
Upon his return to the United States in 1896, Lawson began developing his own aesthetic. He was further encouraged by
Robert Henri
Robert Henri (; June 24, 1865 – July 12, 1929) was an American painter and teacher.
As a young man, he studied in Paris, where he identified strongly with the Impressionists, and determined to lead an even more dramatic revolt against A ...
,
William Glackens
William James Glackens (March 13, 1870 – May 22, 1938) was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School, which rejected the formal boundaries of artistic beauty laid-down by the conservative National Academy of De ...
, and the other independent artists with whom he began to associate around 1903. Lawson moved to
Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in 1898, and his work for the next two decades focused on subjects—Fort Tryon Park, the Harlem River, Spuyten Duyvil, the fields, bridges, docked boats, tree-covered hills, and rocky inclines at the edge of a city on the move—from that still-unpopulated part of the metropolis. His paintings form a "procession of lonely vistas devoid of people," but are filled with an almost tactile sense of paint and an understated chromatic brilliance. (Art critic James Gibbons Huneker, a great admirer of Lawson, referred to his friend's skill as originating in a "palette of crushed jewels.") Like other realists, he worked on-site and traveled with some frequency in search of interesting new subjects; his search for the picturesque took him to Spain, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, Kansas, Colorado, Tennessee, New Mexico, Connecticut, and Florida. Lawson had his first solo exhibition at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[Robert Henri
Robert Henri (; June 24, 1865 – July 12, 1929) was an American painter and teacher.
As a young man, he studied in Paris, where he identified strongly with the Impressionists, and determined to lead an even more dramatic revolt against A ...](_blank)
,
William Glackens
William James Glackens (March 13, 1870 – May 22, 1938) was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School, which rejected the formal boundaries of artistic beauty laid-down by the conservative National Academy of De ...
,
John Sloan
John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 – September 7, 1951) was an American painter and etcher. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known ...
,
George Luks
George Benjamin Luks (August 13, 1867 – October 29, 1933) was an American artist, identified with the aggressively realistic Ashcan School of American painting.
After travelling and studying in Europe, Luks worked as a newspaper illustrator a ...
,
Everett Shinn
Everett Shinn (November 6, 1876 – May 1, 1953) was an American painter and member of the urban realist Ashcan School.
Shinn started as a newspaper illustrator in Philadelphia, demonstrating a rare facility for depicting animated movement, a ...
,
Arthur B. Davies
Arthur Bowen Davies (September 26, 1862 – October 24, 1928) was an avant-garde American artist and influential advocate of modern art in the United States c. 1910–1928.
Biography
Davies was born in Utica, New York, the son of David and Phoeb ...
and
Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Brazil Prendergast (October 10, 1858 – February 1, 1924) was an American artist who painted in oil and watercolor, and created monotypes. His delicate landscapes and scenes of modern life, characterized by mosaic-like color, are ...
.
The Eight
In many ways, Ernest Lawson was an unlikely rebel. A soft-spoken, gracious, and undramatic man, he had no flair for self-promotion and little inclination to paint the rougher aspects of modern city life, which was a hallmark of five of the most significant members of the Eight. (Henri, Glackens, Sloan, Luks, and Shinn were all founding members of what became known as the Ashcan school of American art.) Unlike Henri, Sloan, and Luks, who were teachers as well, he had no worshipful student-following nor was he well-placed in art-political circles in New York, like Arthur B. Davies. He had his devoted fans—the Manhattan restaurateur James Moore (the central figure in William Glackens's famous painting, ''Chez Mouquin'') owned a much-loved collection of Lawsons—but no one thought of him as a radical in any way. If anything, he had more in common with the eighth member of the group, Maurice Prendergast, in his steady reserve and quiet professionalism. But he did share the concerns voiced by Henri and others of the group that the exhibition system in New York, a closed system that led to wider press coverage and lucrative sales for those who worked in an approved manner, was too much a "private club" enterprise and needed shaking up. The exhibition that the Eight staged at the prestigious Macbeth Galleries in New York in 1908 did just that.
The exhibition of The Eight was the "succès de scandale" its organizers hoped for. If sales did not quite measure up to their expectations, the painters nonetheless became centers of media attention for some time. Conservative tastes were affronted, and young artists flocked to the Macbeth Galleries to see a startling range of modern representational art. The show later traveled to Chicago and Boston, where it occasioned more press coverage and public discussion of the direction American art should take. Lawson and his friends had played a role in an important cultural event and in initiating debate about a needed diversity of style and subject matter in American art.
At the same time, though, it was possible for some people to wonder to what extent Lawson was an outsider at all. Later that year, he was named an associate member of the National Academy of Design, and he was made a full academician in 1917. He exhibited as a member of the
Canadian Art Club
The Canadian Art Club was an artists' group established in Toronto in 1907 to advance the standards of Canadian art exhibitions and to exhibit the work of distinguished Canadian artists, particularly those who had studied abroad or lived there. It ...
from 1911 to 1915. He benefited from regular gallery representation, won many prizes throughout his career, and was highly regarded by his peers. In fact,
William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase (November 1, 1849October 25, 1916) was an American painter, known as an exponent of Impressionism and as a teacher. He is also responsible for establishing the Chase School, which later would become Parsons School of Design. ...
considered him America's greatest landscape painter, an endorsement that carried a healthy cachet with it. None of this translated into wealth or fame in the long run, however. Lawson had financial problems all his life and suffered from poor health in his later years.
Lawson was invited to contribute three paintings to the landmark
Armory Show
The 1913 Armory Show, also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was a show organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1913. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America, as well as one of ...
of 1913. Like many American artists at the time, he was not prepared to abandon representational art for the new paths suggested by
Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...
,
Fauvism
Fauvism /ˈfoʊvɪzm̩/ is the style of ''les Fauves'' (French language, French for "the wild beasts"), a group of early 20th-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the Representation (arts), repr ...
, and
Futurism
Futurism ( it, Futurismo, link=no) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such ...
, but he was open to learning more about Post-Impressionism (which he had first been exposed to in Europe), and in New York the opportunities to see the Post-Impressionists increased considerably after the Armory Show. "Acquaintance with
Cézanne's painting convinced
awsonthat Impressionism had lost contact with form in its insistence upon surface light, and in his later works he made an obvious attempt to recapture solidity. Although he never completely assimilated Cézanne's structural methods, Lawson managed to introduce a measure of form into his art and some resemblance to the Aix master...as he dropped the coloristic haze and the pastel prettiness inherited from Twachtman."
Later years
Though his work was sought after by important collectors in the 1910s and 1920s, such as John Quinn, Duncan Phillips, Albert C. Barnes, and Ferdinand Howald, who single-handedly built the modern collection of the
Columbus Museum of Art
The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Formed in 1878 as the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (its name until 1978), it was the first art museum to register its charter with the state of Ohio. The museum collect ...
, Lawson did not maintain a high profile in the American art world as
Precisionism
Precisionism was a modernist art movement that emerged in the United States after World War I. Influenced by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionist artists reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, eliminated detail, and often u ...
, the artists of the Alfred Stieglitz circle (e.g.,
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been called the "Mother of Amer ...
,
John Marin
John Marin (December 23, 1870 – October 2, 1953) was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors.
Biography
Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His mother died nine days after his birth, ...
,
Charles Demuth
Charles Henry Buckius Demuth (November 8, 1883 – October 23, 1935) was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism.
"Search the history of Ameri ...
), and other adventurous movements and individuals took center stage.
Eventually, he left New York. Lawson visited Florida when he befriended Katherine and Royce Powell, his close friends and patrons who lived there. He first stayed with them in Coral Gables in 1931, and he returned there often, moving permanently to Florida in 1936. In his last years, he completed a post office mural in Short Hills, New Jersey (no longer extant), but he focused primarily on painting the Florida landscape. Depressed and in declining health, he drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1939, apparently while swimming on Miami Beach. Friends wondered if Lawson's death had been a suicide.
Lawson's work is little-known today compared to that of many of his friends and associates, but his best paintings can be found in the collections of many North American art museums. Robert Henri insisted that, among landscape artists, he was "the biggest we have had since
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in ...
." Duncan Phillips referred to him as a "great romanticist."
[Wierich, p. 84.] Aside from their qualities as well-made landscapes, Lawson's works have an interesting secondary life today as a record of the twilight of pastoral Manhattan. The
Cathedral of Saint John the Divine
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine (sometimes referred to as St. John's and also nicknamed St. John the Unfinished) is the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. It is at 1047 Amsterdam Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood ...
, in Lawson's 1903 painting of that title, is being erected in the midst of a woodland not far from the campus of
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
and the roar of the El. His Washington Heights of springtime foliage and glens and rowboats is today a thriving Dominican neighborhood, robustly urban, packed with people and buildings, subject of the Broadway musical ''In the Heights.'' Lawson's paintings remind viewers of a world that vanished entirely in the space of a few decades.
Notes
Sources
*Berry-Hill, Henry and Sidney.''Ernest Lawson: American Impressionist 1873-1939''. Leigh-on-Sea, 1968.
*Brown, Milton. ''American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression.'' Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.
*Karpiscak, Adeline Lee. ''Ernest Lawson, 1873-1939, A retrospective Exhibition''. Tucson: University of Arizona Museum of Art, 1979.
*Leeds, Valerie Ann. ''From Prose to Poetry: The Landscapes of Ernest Lawson'', ''Fine Art Connoisseur'', 3 (September/October 2006).
*Leeds, Valerie Ann. ''Ernest Lawson.'' New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2000.
*Perlman, Bennard B. ''Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight.'' New York: Dover, 1979.
*Wierich, Jochen, "Ernest Lawson: Nostalgia for Landscape" in Elizabeth Kennedy, ''The Eight and American Modernisms.'' Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
External links
Image of LawsonErnest Lawson artworks on Art StackErnest Lawson artwork examples on AskART
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lawson, Ernest
1873 births
1939 deaths
19th-century Canadian painters
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Artists from Nova Scotia
Canadian Impressionist painters
American Impressionist painters
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Modern painters
Canadian landscape painters
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Canadian emigrants to the United States
Art Students League of New York alumni
Académie Julian alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
People from Halifax, Nova Scotia
1939 suicides
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19th-century American male artists
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