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Lot Essay
Ernest Lawson painted Union Square in Winter just after the turn of the century, when he and other members of the Eight created their most dramatic images of urban America.
Like his fellow Ashcan painters and many American Impressionists who preceded him, Lawson was fascinated by the modern American city and the lives of the people who inhabited it. In Union Square in Winter, the artist has chosen to depict the city at that moment when the frantic urban pace slows after a snowfall. Like Childe Hassam, who at this time was also painting images of New York in the snow (such as Winter in Union Square, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Lawson selected a commercial part of the city, a snow-covered square whose open expanse and 19th-century buildings grace the city scape. Just visible through the wintry haze is the rounded cupula of the old German Savings Bank. Near the center of the composition, Lawson depicts Henry Kirke Brown's 1856 equestrian statue of George Washington, a focal point of the square. Numerous pedestrians traverse the streets encircling the monument, including a push-cart vendor, one of the storied fixtures of turn-of-the-century New York.
As an early meditation of street life and the urban landscape, Union Square in Winter recalls other Ashcan canvases of New York, such as Robert Henri's masterwork, Snow in New York, 1902 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Union Square in Winter likewise proclaims its Ash-can heritage with its rich, lustrous impasto and emphasis on city dwellers within the urban milieu. Lawson has developed here a narrow tonal range of whites, blues and greens. Highlights have been added with touches of warmer-toned reds, seen especially in the wares of the vender, and pinks, seen in the brownstone in the distance. This subtle mixture of colors and bold painting technique is the hallmark of Lawson's style.
His immediate inspiration was likely his mentor John H. Twachtman, whose nearly monochromatic depictions of the Connecticut countryside Lawson undoubtedly saw while a student of Twachtman and J. Alden Weir in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in the 1890s. Lawson's innovation with Union Square in Winter is to transform the tonal elements of Twachtman's art into an urban setting, softened with snow fall. In this way Lawson would create an entirely new vision of a great metropolis by joining the lyrical qualities of American Impressionism with the avant-garde painting of the Eight.
Like his fellow Ashcan painters and many American Impressionists who preceded him, Lawson was fascinated by the modern American city and the lives of the people who inhabited it. In Union Square in Winter, the artist has chosen to depict the city at that moment when the frantic urban pace slows after a snowfall. Like Childe Hassam, who at this time was also painting images of New York in the snow (such as Winter in Union Square, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Lawson selected a commercial part of the city, a snow-covered square whose open expanse and 19th-century buildings grace the city scape. Just visible through the wintry haze is the rounded cupula of the old German Savings Bank. Near the center of the composition, Lawson depicts Henry Kirke Brown's 1856 equestrian statue of George Washington, a focal point of the square. Numerous pedestrians traverse the streets encircling the monument, including a push-cart vendor, one of the storied fixtures of turn-of-the-century New York.
As an early meditation of street life and the urban landscape, Union Square in Winter recalls other Ashcan canvases of New York, such as Robert Henri's masterwork, Snow in New York, 1902 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Union Square in Winter likewise proclaims its Ash-can heritage with its rich, lustrous impasto and emphasis on city dwellers within the urban milieu. Lawson has developed here a narrow tonal range of whites, blues and greens. Highlights have been added with touches of warmer-toned reds, seen especially in the wares of the vender, and pinks, seen in the brownstone in the distance. This subtle mixture of colors and bold painting technique is the hallmark of Lawson's style.
His immediate inspiration was likely his mentor John H. Twachtman, whose nearly monochromatic depictions of the Connecticut countryside Lawson undoubtedly saw while a student of Twachtman and J. Alden Weir in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in the 1890s. Lawson's innovation with Union Square in Winter is to transform the tonal elements of Twachtman's art into an urban setting, softened with snow fall. In this way Lawson would create an entirely new vision of a great metropolis by joining the lyrical qualities of American Impressionism with the avant-garde painting of the Eight.