Earnest Lee Major was a prominent member of the Boston school of painting, and he was one of the last painters of that era to adopt and promote the 19th century approach to his painting, teaching, and life. As a teacher of art in his later life, his approach to teaching painting involved encouraging his students to study the works of the great masters and to seek to emulate or improve on the best of what they had done. This approach was worlds apart from the way most artists had been trained since that time, and he was considered a bit of an eccentric. Major was always accompanied by his dog no matter where he went, and he presented the accepted image of the nineteenth-century "artist" right up to his death.
