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Ernest Lawson (b.1873, Halifax, Nova Scotia; d.1939, Coral Gables, FL) Spring Tapestry, ca.1930 Oil on canvas Charles F. Smith Fund 1948.9

Ernest Lawson (b. Nova Scotia, 1873-1939)
Spring Tapestry, ca. 1930

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.'—William Glackens, quoted in Ira Glackens, William Glackens and the Ashcan Group (1957)

A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Ernest Lawson grew up in Kingston, Ontario, Kansas City, and Mexico City, following his physician father's many peregrinations. He first studied art in 1888 at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1891 he moved to New York City, where he continued his studies both at the Art Students League and at the Cos Cob, Connecticut, summer school of 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, returning to Paris in triumph, with two of his paintings accepted at the annual Salon des Artistes Françaises. At this point in his career, Lawson's paintings already manifested the influence not only of Twachtman but also of two French Impressionists, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. In the flush of success, Lawson returned to Connecticut in 1894, where he married Ella Holman, one of his 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 settled permanently in New York City in 1898, with residences first in Washington Heights and then in Greenwich Village. After establishing himself in New York, 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, who first exhibited their work together at Macbeth Gallery in 1908 in response to the earlier rejection of some of their work by the National Academy of Design.

Though Lawson made trips to Spain in 1916 and Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in 1924, most of his subjects are drawn from his New York and New England experiences. A favorite subject was the scenery along the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, at the uppermost tip of Manhattan. Spring Tapestry depicts an area called Inwood, with the palisades of the Bronx on the far shore of the Harlem River, as they appeared in about 1930. A row of trees, their tops newly feathered with early spring leaves, screens the distant hillside vista. Newly built apa rtment houses climb the hillsides; below them, a tugboat plies the river, its stack puffing steam.

Spring Tapestry is one of Ernest Lawson's most masterful summations of his singular landscape painting style. A second generation Impressionist, Lawson's practice of "stitching" short, rapid strokes of color into a tapestry-like whole recalls the works of Willard L. Metcalf, Twachtman, and Weir. However, his affinity with other members of The Eight 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 within it. This tension between the gentle Impressionist poetry of spring and the bustle of urban life makes up a large part of Lawson's unique vision as a landscape painter.

For further reading:

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)

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This essay has been condensed from a larger manuscript written by Bruce W. Chambers for the museum's collection catalogue.