Cecil Gordon Lawson

Cecil Gordon Lawson (December 3, 1851 - June 10, 1882), was an English landscape painter.

The youngest son of William Lawson of Edinburgh, a well-regarded portrait painter, and of a mother also known for her flower pieces, he was born in Fountain Place, Wellington, near Shrewsbury. Two of his brothers (one of them, Malcolm, a clever musician and song-writer) were trained as artists, and Cecil was from childhood devoted to art with the intensity of a serious nature. Soon after his birth, the Lawsons moved to London.

Lawson's first works were studies of fruit, flowers, etc., in the manner of William Henry Hunt; followed by riverside Chelsea subjects. His first exhibit at the Royal Academy (1870) was "Cheyne Walk," and in 1871 he sent two other Chelsea subjects. These gained full recognition from fellow-artists, if not from the public. Among his friends were now numbered Fred Walker, GJ Pinwell and their associates. Following them, he made a certain number of drawings for wood-engraving.

Lawson's Chelsea pictures had been painted in rather sombre tones; in the "Hymn to Spring" of 1872 (rejected by the Academy) he turned to a more colourful approach, helped by work done in North Wales and Ireland. Early in 1874 he made a short tour in Holland, Belgium and Paris; and in the summer he painted his large "Hop Gardens of England." This was much praised at the Academy of 1876.

Lawson's triumph was with the luxuriant canvas, "The Minister's Garden", exhibited in 1878 at the Grosvenor Gallery, and afterwards on display in the Manchester Art Gallery. This was followed by several works conceived in a new and tragic mood. Lawson's health began to fail, but he worked on. In 1879 he married Constance, a daughter of sculptor John Birnie Philip, and settled at Haslemere.

His later subjects are from the neighbourhood where he lived (the most famous being "The August Moon," now in the National Gallery, London) or from Yorkshire. Towards the end of 1881 he went to the French Riviera, returned in the spring, and died at Haslemere that summer.

Lawson may be said to have restored to English landscape the tradition of Thomas Gainsborough, John Crome and John Constable, infused with an imaginative intensity of his own. Among English landscape painters of the latter part of the 19th century his is an outstanding name.

See Edmund Gosse, "Cecil Lawson, a Memoir" (1883); Heseltine Owen, "In Memoriam: Cecil Gordon Lawson," "Magazine of Art" (1894).See Walking With the Ancestors, www.wellingtonla21.org.uk/discover