Lawrence belonged to the last cohort of British painters trained in the full classical-academic tradition, a generation whose draughtsmanship and command of large-scale figure composition were sought out for the public murals of mid-century Britain.
Lawrence's formation followed a path that has now almost vanished from British art education. He came up through Hatton's studio in Newcastle and then through Rothenstein's Royal College of Art, two of the most disciplined teaching environments of the period, before the war removed him to the Western Front. The skills he carried back to civilian life, observational drawing, the ability to model the human figure in volume, and the construction of multi-figure compositions, were precisely those for which his subsequent commissions would call.
The Rome scholarship was the central credential of his early career. It brought him into direct contact with the Italian Renaissance and Baroque tradition that had shaped European mural painting for centuries, and the experience marked his work permanently. He returned to England equipped to work in a register few of his contemporaries could match.
His major opportunity arrived in 1927, when he was named one of eight artists commissioned to paint the "Building of Britain" mural scheme in St Stephen's Hall at the Palace of Westminster, a programme conceived as a public statement of national history at the heart of the British political system. Subsequent mural commissions followed for the Bank of England, the Laing Art Gallery and Museum in Newcastle, and County Hall in Chelmsford, placing his work in some of the most significant civic interiors of the period.
Throughout the long span of his Academy career, Lawrence sat at the centre of a particular kind of mid-century British painting, disciplined, figurative, and rooted in academic training, at a moment when modernist and abstract currents were reshaping the broader landscape of British art. His position was that of a senior practitioner of an older tradition, working alongside but largely apart from the avant-garde tendencies that defined his lifetime.
His reputation today rests on the combination of his public mural achievement and a substantial body of portraits and easel pictures characterized by careful drawing, classical structure, and a restrained, observational realism, the marks of a painter who carried the academic tradition of the early twentieth century forward into the postwar period with conviction.