Ernest Lawson
1873-1939
At the beginning of his career, Ernest Lawson represented the best in U.S. realist painting. Lawson was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and studied at the Art Students League in New York with J. Alden Weir and John H. Twachtman as well as in Paris at the Académie Julian.
As Lawson's style began to develop, he moved his family to Manhattan. For eight years Lawson lived in Washington Heights, where he painted its bridges, rivers and rocky pastures. He then moved his studio to Greenwich Village, where he was befriended by William Glackens, George Luks, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn. These artists and three others formed a group called The Eight, and exhibited together in 1908 at the Macbeth Gallery. Their work was seen as an alternative to the conservatism of the National Academy of Design.
Lawson focused his attention on landscape painting, especially in the area north of Manhattan and the Berkshire Hills. A $1,500 prize from the Corcoran Gallery allowed him to take his family to Spain in 1916, where he painted in the regions around Toledo and Segovia.
Lawson was elected to full membership at the National Academy and enjoyed an exhibition at the Nova Scotia Museum of Art. During the last decade of his life, he spent much of his time in Coral Gables, Florida, where he died in 1939.
Actively seeking works by Ernest Lawson.
