Ice-Bound Falls

Ernest Lawsons Ice-Bound Falls from 1919 depicts a frozen waterfall with the rich impasto and shimmering color that earned Lawson the nickname of the pan impressionist among his colleagues in the group that became known as The Eight. Lawson, a Canadian-born painter who studied with Twachtman and exhibited with the Ashcan School, developed a style that combined the broken brushwork and chromatic sensitivity of Impressionism with a subject matter drawn from the urban fringes and rural landscapes of New York and New England. In Ice-Bound Falls, the frozen water is rendered in thick strokes of blue, white, and gray that build up a surface of extraordinary physicality, the paint itself suggesting the texture and weight of ice accumulated over rock. The surrounding landscape is painted in equally generous impastos of greens, browns, and mauves that create a mosaic of color across the canvas, each touch of paint a separate observation of reflected light. The year 1919 places this work in Lawsons mature period, when he had consolidated the technique he called building up in spots, applying individual touches of color that maintain their integrity even as they contribute to a unified impression of place and atmosphere. The effect is both decorative and deeply felt, a painting that gives as much pleasure to the eye as it does to the mind that recognizes the winter landscape as a specific experience of cold and stillness.

Lawson occupies a unique position in American art as the bridge between Impressionist landscape and Ashcan urban realism, and his paintings of frozen landscapes influenced the tradition of winter painting in America that extends through Andrew Wyeth to contemporary painters of the Northeastern landscape.

A richly impastoed winter landscape by Lawson depicting a frozen waterfall with the thick paint surface and shimmering color that earned him the nickname pan impressionist, combining Impressionist technique with Ashcan sincerity of observation.