Colorado & Regional Art

Ernest Lawson was born on March 22, 1873 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He moved with his family to Kansas City, Missouri, where he studied art as a teenager. In 1889, he worked in Mexico City as an engineering draftsman and studied at the Santa Clara Art Academy. From 1891–1892, Lawson joined the Art Students League in New York with John Henry Twachtman. Lawson also studied with Twachtman at an art school in Cos Cob, Connecticut, where Lawson’s impressionistic style and tendencies, such as painting en plein air (outdoors), emerged. Lawson studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, France in 1893, progressing his interest in the French impressionists even further. In 1908, Lawson exhibited with The Eight—artists Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn, John Sloan and himself—at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. After a 1916 visit to Segovia and Toledo, Spain, his color palette became more vivid with thicker applications of paint. He returned to Colorado to teach at the Broadmoor Academy in Colorado Springs from 1927 to 1930. His later life was plagued with illness and financial troubles, and he died in 1939 in Florida. This painting features Lawson’s “crushed jewels” technique, a description thought to have originated from Lawson’s friend and art critic James G. Huneker. No jewels were used, but the thick colors, layered with a palette knife, suggested the shimmer and texture of jewels.