Ernest Lawson - Maturity

Maturity

Upon his return to the States in 1896, he began formulating his own individualistic aesthetic. He was further encouraged by Henri and the other independent artists with whom he began to associate around 1903. Lawson moved to Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in 1898, and his work for the next two decades focused on subjects of that area. Like other realists, he worked directly from the subject, and traveled with some frequency to other places that served as subjects of his art, including Spain, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, Kansas, Colorado, Tennessee, New Mexico, Connecticut, and Florida.

He had his first solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1907, and won a prize in the annual for a winter landscape, the theme which became his single most identifiable subject. The following year, he joined the group that would become known as The Eight (primarily through his friendship with William Glackens) in their defining show at the Macbeth Galleries. Also in 1908, he was named an associate of the National Academy, of which he was made a full academician in 1917. He contributed three paintings in the landmark 1913 Armory Show, and exhibited as a member of the Canadian Art Club from 1911 to 1915.

Lawson won many prizes throughout his career and was highly regarded by his peers. William Merritt Chase considered him America's greatest landscape painter. He had continual financial problems, however, as well as poor health in his later years.

Lawson first became acquainted with Florida when he befriended Katherine and Royce Powell, who became his close friends, supporters, and patrons. Lawson first visited them in Coral Gables, Florida in 1931, and he returned there often until permanently moving there in 1936. In his last years, he completed a post office mural in Short Hills, New Jersey (which is no longer extant), but primarily he focused on painting the Florida landscape. With his health in rapid decline, he drowned under mysterious circumstances while apparently swimming on Miami Beach, Florida, in 1939.