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"E. Lawson" (lower left) oil on canvas 20 1/4 x 24 1/4 in. (50.8 x 61 cm) painted circa 1902 Provenance Private Collection Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1979 Literature Gail Levin, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Twentieth-Century American Painting, London, 1987, pp. 44-45, no. 5 (illustrated, p. 45) At the turn of the 20th century, the northern tip of Manhattan was still an open grid of forests and small farms. In 1898, Ernest Lawson settled there, in Morningside Heights, and was inspired to create his most memorable and sought-after works. He was fresh from years of study in Paris, New York, and Connecticut. A stint at the Art Students League in New York had led him, in 1892, to John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir~dq~s summer classes in Cos Cob, Connecticut, where he was much influenced by Twachtman~dq~s atmospheric, Impressionist style. The following year on a trip to France, the artist encountered the painter Alfred Sisley. Struck by the effectiveness of Sisley~dq~s layered colors and complex surface handling, Lawson developed his own powerful, Impressionist style. Upon his return to the States, he used it to record - not the rolling meadows and flower gardens preferred by his Impressionist colleagues, - but the rivers, hills, and weather-beaten wooden houses of northern Manhattan. Lawson~dq~s attraction to this workaday landscape has been cited as the reason for his inclusion in the group of painters known as "The Eight" or "Ashcan School." But although Lawson allied himself with William Glackens, John Sloan, and the others, and participated in their ground-breaking exhibition at Macbeth Gallery in 1908, the association was more practical than political. Social realism did not interest Lawson and, as a landscape artist, he did not share his colleagues~dq~ desire to paint middle-class urban life. In his own way however, he shared their modernity: Lawson landscapes anchored with prosaic, man-made structures, foreshadow the work of painters like Charles Sheeler and Georgia O~dq~Keeffe. Although he went on to paint in other locales and in an evolving series of styles, Lawson~dq~s early New York landscapes are considered his best work. Stream by the Farm was most likely painted in northern Manhattan around 1902. Its centerpiece is a cluster of farm buildings-all right angles and slanting roofs-that draw the eye across an icy pond and into the frozen fields beyond. Like his mentor Twachtman, Lawson was drawn by the landscape of winter and painted it to perfection. Bare trees stand lacy and sculptural; snowy surfaces shade to blue, green, or ochre according to the light. The same colors are reflected in the depths of the water and in the cloud-scudded sky, creating a unifying, visual armature. Cold air, winter light, rutted snow, half-frozen water-all are made nearly palpable by Lawson-built up with brush and palette knife and layer upon layer of luminous, luxurious color. It was a virtuoso technique that would cause early 20th century critics to call the artist "Lawson of the Crushed Jewels.".