In 1939, painter Ernest Lawson walked fully clothed into the surf at Miami Beach and drowned.

The once-lauded landscape painter, a guiding force among New York’s controversial Ash Can School of realists at the turn of the century, had come to Florida ill and forlorn.

Yet before his death, Lawson found in the combination of sunshine, clear skies and sparkling water a chromatic brilliance that charged his paintings once described as coming from a “palette of crushed jewels.”

Consider Lawson’s intensely energetic canvas Realization (1938), one of 40 paintings currently on display at the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s winter exhibition, “Images of Old Florida (1890-1950).”

It is a precious and often surprising collection that traces the rich variety of artworks made in the Sunshine State during its early epoch of development.

The exhibition presents images of Florida primarily by artists who visited the state and recorded their impressions. And while Lawson’s story is a tragic episode in Florida’s artistic legacy, the locale served as a happier haven for dozens of other notable painters.

The show includes not only landscapes, but also seascapes, cityscapes, architectural studies, still lifes, abstract compositions and portraits. A few photographs were selected for display, too.

Among the acclaimed artists on view are Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, George Inness, Frederic Remington, Jules Pascin, John Singer Sargent, Walker Evans and Andrew Wyeth.

Each of the artists chose a personal way to document the profound natural beauty, social conditions and remarkable playfulness of a region with the idyllic climate that promised a better life.

SPOUTS, SPRIGS AND TARPON SPRINGS

Lawson’s picture Realization is among his last works. It shows a frenzied Gulf Stream with a swirling waterspout in richly impasted pigments. Perhaps a symbol for persuasive vision, the canvas is a spirited reminder of the painter’s final artistic trilogy in paint, which involved the themes of anticipation, realization and retrospection.

Far more bucolic is Homer’s tranquil watercolor landscape St. John’s River, Florida. The earliest piece in the Boca exhibit, the sheet depicts one of the spots that Homer (1836-1910) cherished as an avid angler. He visited Florida first in 1886 and returned seven times through 1909. Only on three occasions, however, did the celebrated American painter create work.

Moran first came to Florida in 1877 on assignment from Scribner’s to illustrate a travelogue. He made numerous sketches while traveling and later completed his canvases in his Long Island studio. In the oil Florida Landscape, St. John’s River Moran creates a rather primeval setting balanced by the sharp verticals of tall palm trees.

Inness had honed a solid career as a landscape painter by 1878 and had traveled extensively. He came to Florida in 1890 and returned every year until his death. In the oil on canvas The Road to Tarpon Springs, Fl., Inness conveys a sense of melancholy through subdued colors and muffled light.

Three still-life paintings in the show were executed by American master Martin Johnson Heade during stays in St. Augustine. Heade came to the area for the first time in 1880. His crisply academic studies, among them Four Cherokee Roses and Magnolias in an Opulescent Vase, come from the collection of the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum in Palm Beach.

PALMETTOS, PIRATES AND PARKING LOTS

Known as a western artist par excellence, Yale-educated Frederic Remington ventured to Florida in 1898 following the troops heading for Cuba during the Spanish-American War. As an artist-correspondent, Remington witnessed the result of moving 20,000 soldiers into Tampa. At the time, the small town was ill-equipped to accommodate troops before their departure by boat.

U.S. Troops Practicing Marching in the Palmettos, Remington’s deftly executed study in a wash of black-and-white paints, reveals quick brush work and an immediate, journalistic approach to an otherwise mundane scene.

Noteworthy landscapes accented with palm trees came from the studios of William Aiken Walker, W. Staples Drown and Felix de Crano. De Crano was a pioneer member of the St. Augustine artists’ colony, a concept developed by entrepreneur Henry Flagler to enhance Florida as a latter-day “renaissance” setting.

Especially fine is Anthony Thieme’s glistening oil Negro Town (1938). Also part of the emerging St. Augustine School of painters, Thieme pays careful attention to shimmering puddles of water handled in a lush impressionist style.

Bulgarian-born Pascin came to America in 1914 to avoid World War I. He journeyed to Louisiana and Florida before settling permanently in Paris, where he died by suicide in 1930. Pascin’s talent was with color, but his dark crayon-on-paper sketch Florida is a haunting little memento nevertheless. The work is from the permanent collection of the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale.

Two of the most valuable pieces in the exhibition are by Sargent (1856-1925) and young Wyeth (b. 1917).

Sargent visited Vizcaya in 1917, the palatial villa in Miami and seasonal residence of industrialist James Deering. Sargent’s watercolor Portrait of James Deering, painted that year, is an eloquent study in white. The artist’s superb control is evident in the bespectacled sitter’s delicate mouth, wispy hair and tropical vanilla ice-cream suit. A gem.

When only age 22, Wyeth made a brief visit to Tampa. He had had one-person exhibitions in 1936 in Philadelphia and in 1937 at New York’s Macbeth Gallery. Critics favorably compared his watercolors in these shows with Homer, which may have prompted Wyeth’s trip. The watercolor Pirates in the Boca Raton exhibition is from a series of five that Wyeth painted in Tampa.

BATHING BEAUTIES, POST-WAR REFLECTIONS

Abstraction begins to play a major role among artists working in Florida after 1935. One need only look at Eliot O’Hara’s chisled watercolor Coconut Forest and Palm Ridge Club to sense the influence of both French modernism and cubism.

More native in spirit is the style of Clarence Carter’s bold Riding the Surf, with its tumbling waves, beach ball and ladies in swimsuits. Carter, who worked in Florida on two occasions, also produced the much tighter cityscape New Construction in Lakeland, Fl.

Adolf Dehn worked in Pensacola and taught at the Norton School of Art in West Palm Beach during the 1950 and 1951 seasons. Well known for his barnyard scenes crowded with animals, Dehn also employed a rather cluttered compositional technique in the watercolor Beach at Key West. His curious “portrait,” The Queen of Key West, evidences Dehn’s affection for painting bizarre characters.

Photographers Al Burgert and Jean Burgert, Marion Post Wolcott and Walker Evans focused on the effects of the Great Depression in Florida. Their works often capture the disturbing disparity between the hardships of migrant workers and the lifestyles of the well-to-do within a comparatively small geographic area. Evans’ 1939 gelatin silver print Migratory Worker’s Camp: Single Room Cabin, Two Dollars a Week; Double Room Cabin, Four Dollars; Water Must Be Hauled, Belle Glade is a marvelous exposure in sync with its explicit (and clever) title.

Milton Avery first came to the Venice-Englewood area in the late 1940s, but he failed to establish an artists’ colony there. But Avery found the flat terrain and foliage perfect for his acute sense of design and interest in creating odd spatial relationships through colors of relatively equal values.

His Tropical Palms is a modernist work that stands in marked contrast with Moran’s and Heade’s heroic 19th century visions in paint of the Florida wilderness. For even in Avery’s day, the romantic and unspoiled vision that was old Florida had begun to deteriorate.

Avery’s work heralded the coming of a well-populated vacation land where nature and the blight of progress merge to create not only newer social concerns and economic, but new artistic possibilities as well.

FLORIDA SHOW

“Images of Old Florida (1890-1950) continues through Feb. 3 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, 801 W. Palmetto Park Road. Call 1-407-392-2500.