Lawson's work is little-known today compared to that of many of his friends and associates, but his best paintings can be found in the collections of many American art museums. Robert Henri insisted that, among landscape artists, he was "the biggest we have had since Winslow Homer." Duncan Phillips referred to him as a "great romanticist." Aside from their qualities as well-made landscapes, Lawson's works have an interesting secondary life today as a record of the twilight of pastoral Manhattan. The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, in Lawson's 1903 painting of that title, is being erected in the midst of a woodland not far from the campus of Columbia University and the roar of the El. His Washington Heights of springtime foliage and glens and rowboats is today a thriving Dominican neighborhood, robustly urban, packed with people and buildings, subject of the Broadway musical "In the Heights." Lawson's paintings remind viewers of a world that vanished entirely in the space of a few decades.