(1828–1917)
Alexander Lawrie was born in New York City and began his career as an engraver’s apprentice. In 1851 he began to pursue painting in Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and shared a studio with his good friend, the artist William Trost Richards. Subscribers in Philadelphia raised funds for Lawrie and Richards to study in Europe in 1855; although the artists took separate routes, they were together in Paris, and Richards joined Lawrie in Düsseldorf, where Lawrie studied with Emanuel Leutze until late 1857. After Lawrie served and was wounded in the Civil War, the artists traveled together again on several sketching trips in the Adirondacks.
From the late 1850s through the mid-1860s, Richards worked in the Pre-Raphaelite style then popular in America, which emphasized the meticulous representation of landscape and still-life forms through the use of nature studies. Lawrie’s first-hand experience of Richards’ working method while in the Adirondacks may have influenced him to adopt a similar practice. While Lawrie’s early Adirondack journals describe wide, panoramic views typical of the Düsseldorf school, his entries from the late 1860s often focus on the beauty of forest interiors and the shores of lakes.
Lawrie’s works can be found in the collections of the West Point Museum and Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, New York; and the Indiana State House, Indianapolis.
[1] Alexander Lawrie: Views of Essex County, New York, exh. cat. (Washington, D. C.: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 1993), 14.
