Lawson was a Northern Irish painter of mainly horses, hunting, game and other animal and bird subjects in country landscapes. The Northern Irish Civil Service has two and there are 29 at Sentry Hill, Antrim, now preserved as a historic farmhouse, all apparently obtained (by purchase and gift) by its last private owner Dr Joe Dundee. A horseman involved with the East Antrim hunt, Dundee was a friend of Lawson and a number of the paintings record incidents in his equestrian life from childhood on, with others more general. Lawson was born in Belfast on 26th May 1951 and was a nephew of the better known and more stylistically ‘modern’ Northern Irish painter Basil Blackshaw (1932–1916). By the early 1980s he lived at Parkgate, about four miles from Sentry Hill, and is reported to have been Head of Art at Antrim Grammar School, but later gave up teaching to paint full-time.