Walking with the Ancestors - Cecil Lawson

To London

The Lawson family finally left Shropshire in 1861, initially settling in St Pancras, where Cecil attended a local Dame School. According to legend, he was not an ardent scholar and apparently ran home one day after being unable to answer a question ‘patent to much smaller boys than he’. Rather than lock himself in his room, the young artist supposedly returned to school dragging a giant canvas, which he projected in front of his teacher enquiring ‘whether she thought she ought to talk in that way to a boy who could paint so large a picture’! Moving in the more refined cultural circles of the capital clearly benefited Lawson, whose drawings were soon attracting praise from established artists, such as the illustrator Fred Walker. This persuaded him to abandon large-scale painting in favour of minute studies of fruit, flowers and elements of landscapes, such as clouds, blossom and leaves. Lawson became so skilled in this endeavour that he was able to earn a living as a professional artist by the age of 14, passing off his work to local dealers under the signature of watercolorist William Hunt (so convincingly, it seems, his pictures were apparently sold on as original work of the acknowledged still-life master). By 1869, Lawson, who was a devotee of Gainsborough, had rekindled his interest in larger scale painting and embarked on a year of self-imposed study of compositional technique at the National Gallery that resulted in his first important work.