Robert Lawrence

Robert Pearson Lawrence led two very different lives concurrently as an investment banker on Wall Street and as a painter, an illustrator, and an art teacher. He was born in Setauket, New York, on the north shore of Long Island. For thirty years, he worked for Wood, Struthers and Company, an asset management firm for wealthy clients. The primary employees of this company were described in a book review as “conservative investment advisers.”

Details of Lawrence’s careers are sparse, and exact dates are lacking, but information has been found on a few major events. At some point, Lawrence obtained his art education at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and the Art Students League in Manhattan, and in Woodstock, New York, where Birge Harrison conducted summer courses in landscape painting. Towards the end of World War I, Lawrence married just four months before serving as second lieutenant in the United States Army infantry from August 1917 until December 1918. On occasion he did illustration work for Life and Woman’s Home Companion magazines. He also taught life classes at Parsons School of Design and the Traphagen School of Fashion, both in New York. At the time of World War II, Lawrence volunteered for the United Service Organizations (USO), where he painted portraits of soldiers at the Ashford General Hospital in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

In the 1950s, Lawrence left New York and spent much of his time in Tryon, North Carolina, which had been a well-known art colony in the western part of the state since the 1870s. It’s likely that he met Dorothy and Charles Quest and Fred Reich who were residents there at the time. In Tryon, Lawrence embraced his passion for oil painting with plein-air studies of the nearby mountainous countryside through the seasons and a one-man exhibition of his work was held in 1961. He stayed for only a couple of decades, eventually returning north before his death in 1970 in New Jersey.