Spring Tapestry
Artist
Ernest Lawson
(Canadian-American, 1873 - 1939)
Dateca. 1930
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions40 1/8 x 50 in. (101.9 x 127 cm)
Frame Dimension: 45 × 55 × 2 7/8 in. (114.3 × 139.7 × 7.3 cm)
Frame Dimension: 45 × 55 × 2 7/8 in. (114.3 × 139.7 × 7.3 cm)
ClassificationsOil Painting
Credit LineCharles F. Smith Fund
Terms
Object number1948.09
Description"Spring Tapestry" is a masterful summation of Earnest Lawson's singular landscape style. Although a charter member of the Ashcan School of American Realist painters, Lawson is more often thought of as an Impressionist because of his practice of "stitching" short rapid strokes of color into a tapestrylike whole. Yet his affinity with other members of The Eight, like John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Luks, is revealed not only in his general preference for urban scenery but also in his insistence, underlying the flurry of broken brushwork, on the concreteness of nature and the continuing human presence. As Glackens once observed in defense of his friend: "Lawson was accused of failing to disguise the more rugged elements in his canvases. His rocks looked hard and harsh--in other words, like rocks, not cream puffs; and he often included some human sign--a tumbledown shack, a sagging jetty, an abandoned rowboat--which in those genteel days were evidently considered no better than ashcans, and no fit subjects for 'art.'"(1) "Spring Tapestry" depicts the upper reaches of Manhattan, called Inwood, together with the palisades of the Bronx along the Harlem River. A row of trees, their tops newly feathered with early spring leaves, screens the distant hillside vista. Newly built apartment houses climb the hillsides; below them, a tugboat plies the river, its stack puffing steam. In the foreground, serving as a répoussoir from which the fragile trees arise, is an adamantine ridge, made of rocks much like those Glackens described.
This tension between the panoramic vistas of the Hudson River School tradition and the gentle Impressionist poetry of spring on the one hand and the bustle of urban life and the resistant tactility of nature on the other makes up a large part of Lawson's unique magic as a landscape painter. Within Lawson's works many of all the conflicting strains of our century's sensibility vie and are then resolved in compelling unities.
BWC
Bibliography:
Frederic Newlin Price, "Ernest Lawson: Canadian American" (New York: Ferargil, 1930); Ira Glackens, "William Glackens and the Ashcan Group" (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1957); Henry and Sidney Berry-Hill, "Ernest Lawson, American Impressionist" (Leigh-on-Sea, England: F. Lewis Publishers, 1968); Adeline Lee Karpiscak, "Ernest Lawson, 1873-1939" (Tucson: University of Arizona Museum of Art, 1979).
Notes:
1 . Glackens, "William Glackens", p. 90.
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