Biography
Cecil Constant Philip Lawson (b. Kensington, London 1880 - d. Fulham, London 1967), son of the landscape painter Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849-1882) and his wife, the flower painter, Constance Philip (1854-1929), eldest daughter of the sculptor John Birnie Philip (1824-1975). He was educated at Charterhouse and then spent a few years in Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon, played football for the Sporting Club de Paris and joined a circle of military artists, among whom he developed a distinctive style of painting. He enlisted as a private in the Westminster Dragoons, and for most of it served with them in the Middle East. During WW1 he was at Gallipoli, then in Egypt and Palestine, including at the battle for Beersheba and the capture of Jerusalem in 1917.
Lawson exhibited at the International Society, the Royal Academy, London and the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts between 1913 and 1923. Although he was never an official war artist, the Imperial War Museum has a group of oil paintings by him of the Flanders battlefields, and others of the Second World War, as well as a collection of his drawings of army uniforms Between the wars, Lawson had begun writing and illustrating (in watercolours) the History of Uniforms of the British Army, volumes of which were published throughout the 1940s and 1960s. He also published and illustrated an anthology of naval songs and ballads in 1933.