During the early twentieth century, Ernest Lawson was one of the many artists who opposed the conservatism of The National Academy of Design. Lawson became associated with The Eight, the Independents, and participated in the Armory Show of 1913, joining in artistic groups and exhibitions that served the artist’s desire to exhibit beyond the Academy’s confines. Lawson’s subject matter—the workday fringes of the city—not only aligns him with the Ashcan artists who preferred ‘slice of life’ subjects, but also ensured that his art would be regarded as sufficiently progressive. Today, Lawson is generally viewed as an Impressionist, but at the time his lonely scenes were strikingly but acceptably new and exemplified modernism in America.
The fourteen Lawson paintings in the Collection today include landscapes of the Washington Heights period, between 1898 and 1915, as well as scenes from his travels such as New England Birches, ca. 1919, Twilight in Spain, ca. 1916, and Path of Sunlight, New Mexico, ca. 1927. The artist rarely dated his works, and he repeated favorite subjects. Among Lawson’s preferred New York subjects were the graceful bridges linking Manhattan with parts beyond; a haunting theme, they became increasingly imposing, moving from a position at middle distance, as in High Bridge—Early Moon, ca 1910, to the close view and high horizon of Spring Morning, ca. 1913, and finally to the commanding presence of Spring Night, Harlem River, 1913. A later work, May in the Mountains, purchased in 1919, the year it was created, allows a glimpse of Lawson's later, almost expressionistic, style.
Lawson's work appears to have been an enthusiasm shared by both Duncan Phillips and his brother James when they first became interested in collecting. Phillips remembered High Bridge—Early Moon as one of his first purchases, made around 1912 with money from his allowance. In 1915 James bought Spring, which was one of two paintings his young widow, Alice, gave to the museum in 1920. By 1917, Phillips knew Lawson personally, and in his essay about the artist from this year he stresses Lawson’s American sense of independence and his "subjectivity...which lifts him to a higher plane than the art of Claude Monet…." Phillips luxuriated in the "almost candied succulence to [Lawson's] glazed surfaces" and placed him in the context of the American tradition.
Around 1922 Phillips ranked five Lawsons among eighty of his favorite paintings and proudly stated that he had bought Lawson's work "when he was comparatively unknown. Today he is regarded by the most competent critics as the greatest colorist and the greatest living landscapist and one of the most original talents America has produced." In 1925 Phillips gave him a one-person exhibition. However, the following year, while still calling Lawson "a genius," Phillips added a note of reserve: It will never be known whether this diminished appreciation was due to a change in taste or the artist's sad personal decline.
Lawson lived to see his art become outdated. While the Armory Show in 1913 had proved a jarring but important revelation for Phillips, it had also displaced artists such as Lawson, who had led the rebellion. In his early career as a collector, Phillips had seen Lawson as the embodiment of the spirit of America: independent, insisting on the artist's right to exhibit freely and paint humble, honest views of a changing country. Soon the avant-garde ideas of other Americans such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin, were to open new vistas for Phillips and, with a new artistic vocabulary, lead him to a profound appreciation of abstraction.