Dawson Dawson-Watson

Dawson Dawson-Watson was a multi-talented artist and designer whose peripatetic career included a five-year residence in the important international artists' colony of Giverny, France, during its formative years. Dawson-Watson was born in London, the son of English landscape artist John Dawson-Watson (1832–92), and studied in England with expatriate American artist Mark Fisher (1841–1923). Dawson-Watson went to Paris for further training, studying there with several successful traditional French painters and decorators under whose tutelage he mastered a variety of media. In 1888 he met and married Mary Hoyt Sellar, an American traveling in France. At that time, according to Dawson-Watson’s later account of the Giverny colony’s origins, his acquaintance John Leslie Breck persuaded him to visit the picturesque Normandy village. Dawson-Watson’s proposed two-week stay there eventually stretched to five years of almost uninterrupted residency, during which he became a fixture of its tight-knit artists’ community and editor and printer of its ephemeral handmade journal, the Courrier innocent. In Giverny, Dawson-Watson painted rather traditional depictions of French rural life with the vibrant brushwork and purple shadows associated with the impressionism of Claude Monet (1840–1926), Giverny’s most famous resident.

In 1893, Dawson-Watson’s former classmate James Caroll Beckwith urged him to go to the United States. He worked successively in New York, Boston, and Hartford, Connecticut, where he directed the Hartford Art Society for four years. He returned to Wales and England briefly, but finding it difficult to earn a living there moved to Canada for three years before taking up a teaching position at the Byrdcliffe art colony in Woodstock, New York. He then moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he taught at Washington University until 1915. During his years in St. Louis he spent his summers painting landscapes in New England and also worked in pageant design, decoration, and craft production.

Dawson-Watson served as art director of the St. Louis Industrial Exhibition in 1920 and the Missouri Centennial the following year. In the 1920s, he was occupied with mural projects and theater design, and in 1934 he won a mural commission from the Civil Works Administration, a depression-era federal arts support program. With his appointment as director of the San Antonio [Texas] Art Guild in 1918, he began to divide his time between St. Louis and San Antonio, to which he moved permanently in 1926. Around that time Dawson-Watson began to concentrate on painting the Texas landscape, especially its cacti. He was given numerous solo exhibitions in Texas in his lifetime and exhibited widely throughout the United States and in Canada and London, winning several prizes. Dawson-Watson is remembered today mainly for his cacti paintings and for his important role in the early history of the Giverny colony.