Part of the New York social realist group “The Eight,” Ernest Lawson stood apart as the member that exhibited pure landscapes. He worked in a near-pure Impressionist style, often on the subject of the New York landscape. Ernest Lawson was born in Nova Scotia in 1873 and moved to Missouri at the age of fifteen. In Mexico City, he worked as a draughtsman for an engineering company before enrolling in the Art Students League with John Henry Twachtman, who would immensely impact Lawson’s work. Lawson was drawn to the beauty of painting landscapes, and created his most important paintings while in Washington Heights in Manhattan for eight years. Among noted exhibitions Lawson participated in include the Landmark exhibition of The Eight, the 1913 Armory Show, and the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition. His approach to landscapes always began en plein air, or outdoors, painting directly upon the canvas without any preliminary drawings from which to build on. More directly, his landscape depictions included pure landscapes, foreign scenes, urban views, and rural village scenes. He utilized a rich and varied palette of highly contrasting colors and rough impasto textures, described by some as resulting in a “crushed jewel” effect. Influence by The Eight moved his art towards less picturesque, in which the brushstrokes took on their own structural significance. An unknown cause of death took Lawson’s life in 1939, his body found on a beach in Coral Gables, Florida where he had lived for the last three years of his life.