Summer Landscape, Connecticut

In Summer Landscape, Connecticut, Ernest Lawson has pushed the horizon line almost to the top of the painting. He frequently used the device of a scrim of trees in the foreground. Whether the trees are leafless or in full summer foliage, as seen here, linearity is emphasized. Paint, thickly applied in short, percussive strokes, gives a tactile quality to the surface. In 1912, when the emerging collector Duncan Phillips purchased his first painting, he chose Lawson's High Bridge - Early Moon (1910).