Jonas Lie

Jonas Lie (1880-1940) was a prolific American painter known for his coastal views of New England and his atmospheric scenes of New York City. He became the president of the National Academy of Design from 1935 to 1939, a year before his death, one of the most prestigious positions available to an American painter of his era. Lie was also renowned for a series of paintings depicting the last days of construction of the Panama Canal in 1913. These paintings were given to the United States Military Academy at West Point in memory of General Goethals, and his most acclaimed work from this series, The Conquerors, Panama Canal, now hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lie was born in Moss, Norway, to an accomplished Norwegian engineer and an American mother. Named after his uncle Jonas Lie, a novelist and close friend of Henrik Ibsen, the young Jonas went to Paris to live with his uncle in 1892, after his father's death. There the twelve-year-old boy was influenced by the creative spirit found in his uncle's home, and his early exposure to the intellectual and artistic environment of late nineteenth-century Paris shaped his sensibility at a formative moment.

In 1893 Jonas moved to New York City, where he took evening classes at Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League, while at the same time designing fabric patterns for a textile company to earn money for his education. This practical experience with color, pattern, and design would inform his later painting, giving him an unusually developed sense of decorative composition. After the completion of his education Lie spent most of his summers along the New England coast and in Canada. Here he would paint bright, Impressionistic harbor scenes and rocky, coastal views, which he would exhibit regularly at major American venues.

Lie's paintings combine Scandinavian atmospheric sensibility with the brighter palette and painterly touch of American Impressionism, producing a distinctive body of work that captured the working harbors, rocky shores, and industrial landscapes of the American northeast. His pictures are held in the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, and other major American collections.