Ernest Lawson. Ernest Lawson was a Canadian-American painter and a member of The Eight, a group of artists who formed a loose association in 1908 to protest the narrowness of taste and restrictive exhibition policies of the conservative, powerful National Academy of Design.
Though Lawson was primarily a landscape painter, he also painted a small number of realistic urban scenes. His painting style is heavily influenced by the art of John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, and Alfred Sisley.
Though considered an American Impressionist, Lawson falls stylistically between Impressionism and realism. Ernest Lawson was born in 1873 in Halifax, Nova Scotia to a prominent family, and arrived in the United States in 1888 and settled in Kansas City.
In 1891, he went to live in New York and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, studying under John Twachtman, who introduced him to Impressionism and was the central influence of his formative years. He later continued to study with Twachtman and with J. Alden Weir at their Cos Cob, Connecticut summer art school in the 1890s.
To some degree, one art historian has noted, Lawson was a product of the art colony movement. Lawson visited France in 1893 and studied at the Academie Julian with Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. He practiced plein air painting in southern France and at Moret-sur-Loing, where he met the English Impressionist