Critics sometimes feel a need to place the career of Ernest Lawson on one or the other side of a divide: was he an American Impressionist, under the influence of J. Alden Weir and John Twachtman? Or was he a member of The Eight, an organizer of the Armory Show, and an unshrinking, unfussy chronicler of modern urban life? The answer is that he was both, and not quite either. His involvement in the Armory Show was minimal, and his love for nature vastly exceeded his interest in showing a gritty city; just as certainly one can say that he moved confidently away from what Milton Brown called “the colorist haze and pastel prettiness [of] Twachtman.” For what American Impressionist could be described by Robert Henri as “the biggest we have had since Winslow Homer?” And what Ashcan artist would William Merritt Chase call America’s greatest landscape painter?

Studying under Weir and Twachtman, Lawson quickly absorbed many of the lessons of treating light. But Lawson soon pushed toward a more vigorous handling of the paint, allowing it to accrue in small piles and furrows. And, all the while he was building relationships with the only club that would have him: the group of independent-minded painters who came to be called The Eight. He did not show with the Impressionists known as The Ten, a group which included Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf and Edmund Tarbell, nor was he accepted into the National Academy until 1917. A loner, and increasingly a drinker, he made his home with the other outsiders. Lawson’s huddled, boulder-like forms pre-figure some of Marsden Hartley’s work, even as they echo the influence of Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose work Lawson admired. One critic summed up the work neatly as “a palette of crushed jewels,” as if something beautiful and precious had met a violent end.