Ernest Lawson

born Halifax, Canada, 1873; died Miami Beach, Florida, 1939

BiographyErnest Lawson spent his boyhood in Ontario because his father, a doctor, had taken a job in Kansas City and Lawson decided not to move until he turned age 15. When he joined his family, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. The next year he travelled in Mexico with his father and worked as a draftsman and studied at the Santa Clara Art Academy. In 1890, he went to New York to enroll in the Art Students League and from 1892-1894, spent time at the summer school of Cos Cob, Connecticut with his friends and Art Students League teachers John Twachtmann and J. Alden Weir and other Impressionist painters at that art colony. From 1893 to 1898, he was in France which included study in Paris at the Academie Julian with Jean Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. In Paris, he shared a studio with Somerset Maugham, who used him as the prototype for Frederic Lawson in his novel, "Of Human Bondage."

Returning to New York City in 1894, he settled there for many years, living from 1898 in Washington Heights, which then was a rural area with much wooded landscape and grazing animals. He painted the bucolic landscape around him, especially the Hudson River in winter, and generally led a quiet life although he continued to travel including back to France and to Spain and throughout New England including Cos Cob, Connecticut and Cornish, New Hampshire. He also returned to Kansas City to teach at the Art Institute in 1926 and the Broadmoor Academy in from 1927 to 1928.

In 1908, he participated in the exhibition of "The Eight" at Macbeth Gallery. In 1912-1913, he was one of the founders of the National Association of Painters and Sculptors. This organization planned the 1913 Armory Show that remains famous in art history for being a large-scale introduction of modernist art to the American public. In 1917, he was elected a Full Member of the National Academy of Design.

[source: Gratz Gallery]

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