Ernest Lawson

Ernest Lawson was born on March 22, 1873, in Nova Scotia, Canada. When he was fifteen, Lawson and his family moved to Kansas City, where his father practiced as a physician. Lawson studied at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1888-1889. By 1890, Lawson had relocated to the Art Students League of New York where he was introduced to French Impressionism and other European movements by painters John Twatchman and Julien Alden Weir. Under their instruction, he began painting outdoors, rapidly applying paint with a palette knife to capture the ephemeral hues of the landscape. In 1894, two of Lawson's landscape paintings were exhibited at the international Paris Salon. Soon after, he moved to France to continue studying Impressionism with Jean Paul Laurens, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Alfred Sisley.  

Around 1900, Ernest Lawson settled in New York and joined a group of avant-garde painters known as The Eight. They defined a new style of painting called the Ashcan School that depicted "real" working-class life rather than idealized or symbolic subject matter. While Lawson preferred rural over urban scenes, he strongly identified with The Eight's disdain for the National Academy of Design. However, as Lawson rose to fame, he was soon elected into the National Academy and other powerful institutions.

Ernest Lawson was most celebrated for what New York critic James Huneker called his "crushed jewel" style. Using impasto techniques, Lawson created thick, intricate layers of color, giving his paintings a shimmering, radiant sense of depth. He reflected that "Color is my specialty in art. … It affects me like music affects some persons -- emotionally" (Leeds, "Ernest Lawson in a New Light," 13).

Lawson captured snowscapes, mountain ranges, bodies of water and rolling hills. He exhibited at major venues, including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the National Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to painting, Lawson taught briefly at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Broadmoor Academy in Colorado. 

Although Ernest Lawson was a national success, he faced financial hardship and long-lasting depression that developed after his service in World War I. Toward the end of his life, Lawson moved to Florida to reinvigorate his painting practice with new scenery while receiving treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. Ernest Lawson died on December 18, 1939, and has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions since.