American Masterpieces from Dryads Green Gallery (Please Scroll Down--Catalogue is Alphabetical by Artist Last Name)

Artist Name:        Ernest Lawson       Artist Dates:        1873 - 1939       Painting Title:      Rocky Mountain Farm Painting Date:      Undated, ca. 1929       Medium:             Oil on Masonite Signature:            Signed            Provenance:        Sotheby's       Condition:           Very Good Size Unframed:    25 x 29 3/4    Size Framed:        32 x 37       Artist Best Price:   $528,000 Our Price:            SOLD

Curator's Comments: Our Lawson, appears to be another view in the Colorado series focused on the Silver Dollar Mine at Cripple Creek. We recommend a comparison with Lawson’s work in the Smithsonian, shown below, where the house in the foreground here is represented in a distant perspective that is more focused on the mining operations, which are farther away in our work. Lawson studied only briefly in France, but came under the influence of Twachtman at the Art Students League in New York in 1890.  By 1898, he had moved to the city’s Washington Heights section, where countryside and river views still dominated. Lawson left New York, painting and traveling widely, until he settled in Florida at the close of his career. He participated in both the landmark exhibition of The Eight in 1908 and the Armory Show of 1913—but his work is unallied with either Ashcan Realism or the Surrealism to come.

We think of Lawson, along with Walter Elmer Schofield, as one of the two preeminent U.S. landscape artists of the first half of the 20th century. Both painters achieved a breakthrough, going far beyond naturalism, tonalism, and even impressionism to create the unique mode of expression that we call art. Lawson’s imposto technique is layered onto the raw-side of the masonite, in what is clearly a very fine representation of what critic J.G. Huneker called coloration "made from crushed jewels." Our image here picks up a bit too much of the light-green tint in the foothills—what is genuinely magical about the painting is that it gleams a total silver white when illuminated by horizontal beams of daylight. We have seen nothing like this effect, and it may be that Lawson was playing with the idea of the tin-roofed shanty and the silver mine as related to nature overall.

Lawson's Silver Dollar Mine in the Smithsonian

In so many of the great Lawsons, the hills and mountains dominate, but there always remains a single slight human element, the toy-like tug for example in Lawson’s Saugerties canvas, and here the Rocky Mountain farm, which remind us of the true human scale. Ira Glackens, in his memoir of his father,  also makes this point when summarizing the criticism Lawson received at the time of The Eight's debut exhibition: " He 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 tumble down 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." Our work is in very good condition as opposed to others of this kind—a light cleaning would be a benefit, and the worn, but solid frame looks like the painting’s first.

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