Ernest Lawson

(American born Canada, 1873 - 1939)

Lawson Studied with John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902) at the Art Students League in New York and at Cos Cob, Connecticut. A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Lawson went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. By 1894, he had met Alfred Sisley (1839-1899). Soon Lawson would learn to apply his paints more heavily and broadly: his later paintings are known for their thick impasto. Later in 1894, two of Lawson’s paintings, Evening Sunlight and Morning, were accepted for exhibition at the Salon des Artistes Français. Also in 1894, Lawson married Ella Holman back in the United States; by the time their daughter Margaret was born later that year, the couple had settled again in Paris. In 1895 Lawson returned to the United States, where he became closely associated with the urban Realists often known as the Ashcan School or The Eight. Lawson’s later paintings are not so easily classified, but are mostly straight forward Impressionistic responses to the landscapes he saw wherever he traveled. Lawson was a member of numerous art organizations, including the American Association of Painters and Sculptors—of which he was a founder—which organized the Armory show in New York in 1913. He exhibited extensively throughout the United States, especially in New York and his work can be found in many important public and private collections of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American painting.