Cecil Gordon Lawson

Later Victorian Portraits Catalogue Entry

Sitter in 4 portraits
Cecil Lawson learned to paint at home, following the example of his father, the portrait painter William Lawson, and his brother, also an artist. In 1869, he devoted himself to the study of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape, copying paintings in the National Gallery. He first had his work exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871, but he found this a dissatisfying outlet for his work, and began successfully to exhibit instead at the Grosvenor Gallery from 1878. He died, aged thirty, of an infection of the windpipe and inflammation of the lungs. He was one of the most original and progressive landscape painters of his day, and many critics and fellow artists saw his early death as a great loss to English art.