Ernest Lawson

Ernest Lawson (b. Nova Scotia, 1873-1939)

Ernest Lawson was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1873. (It was Lawson himself who, after settling in the United States, perpetuated the myth that he had been born in San Francisco during an ocean voyage his parents were taking on his grandfather's clipper ship.) Following his physician father's many peregrinations, Lawson grew up in Halifax; Kingston, Ontario; Kansas City, Missouri; and Mexico City. His first art studies were at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1888. In 1891 Lawson moved to New York City. He continued his studies there at the Art Students League, and at Cos Cob, Connecticut, with John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir. In 1893 he traveled to Paris, where he enrolled in the Académie Julian. He spent the summer of 1894 in Martigues, a fishing village in the south of France, and returned to Paris triumphant, two of his paintings having been accepted at the annual Salon des Artistes Françaises. At this time, Lawson's paintings already manifested the influence not only of Twachtman but also of the French Impressionists Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. In the flush of success, Lawson returned to Connecticut in 1894 and married Ella Holman, one of his former art teachers in Kansas City. He immediately returned to France, where he stayed for two more years. In 1896 he and his wife moved to Toronto and two years later they settled in New York, first in Washington Heights and then in Greenwich Village. Lawson developed close friendships with William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, George Luks, and Robert Henri. This group of artists made up the core of The Eight, or the Ashcan School painters, who first exhibited together at Macbeth Gallery in 1908 in response to the earlier rejection of some of their work by the National Academy of Design. Lawson also participated in the Society of Independent Artists exhibition of 1910 and served on the Committee on Foreign Exhibitions for the 1913 Armory Show. Although most of his subjects were drawn from his New York and New England experiences, Lawson made sketching trips to Spain in 1916 and to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in 1924. In 1926 he joined the teaching staff of the Kansas City Art Institute and taught at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in summer 1927. In 1936, the Lawsons moved to Florida, where the artist died of a heart attack three years later.

Spring Tapestry, ca. 1930

Oil on canvas, 40 1/8 x 50 in. (101.9 x 127 cm)

Signed twice (lower left and lower right): E. Lawson

Charles P. Smith Fund (1948.9)

“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:

. Glackens, “William Glackens”, p. 90.