Born Lee Belling, the future artist came to America in 1879 with his mother, Louise Belling, who, in 1883, married Charles Lawrie, and the young boy took his step-father's surname. The child had little formal education and by the age of twelve was working for a firm of lithographers; but he soon became interested in sculpture and in 1892 he was apprenticed to Chicago sculptor Richard Henry Park. At the same time, Lawrie assisted several other sculptors including A. Phimister Proctor and Philip Martiny who were working on various projects for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1894, Lawrie went east where he alternated between Boston and New York, working for William Ordway Partridge, Henry Hudson Kitson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and George Brewster, among others.
Lawrie received his first solo commission in 1900 for three marble panels for the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Public Library. Thus began a life-long interest in architectural sculpture. During the next quarter century, he executed many works for buildings designed by Bertram Goodhue, including sculpture for the chapel and the barracks at West Point, religious figures for the main entrance of the church of St. Vincent Ferrer, New York, and the elaborate reredos of St. Thomas's Church on Fifth Avenue in that city. The sculptor's affiliation with Goodhue continued in the commissions surrounding the erection of the Nebraska State Capitol in 1920 (see below). He eventually even modeled Goodhue's tomb in the Chapel of the Intercession in New York after the architect's death in 1924.
Portrait statues and decorative elements by Lawrie also adorn James Gamble Rogers's Harkness Memorial Tower at Yale. He executed reliefs for the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington, the St. Paul, Minnesota, City Hall, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Louisiana State Capitol. His panel, Wisdom Planning the Universe, and his famous large bronze Atlas are at Rockefeller Center in New York.
Lawrie served as sculptural advisor for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, the 1939 New York World's Fair, and the American Battle Monuments Commission. He was appointed for two terms as sculptor member of the National Commission of Fine Arts under Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt. Early in his career, he taught at the Yale School of Fine Arts (1908-1919), at the Harvard School of Architecture (1910-1912), and, later, at the Beaux-Arts Institue of Design in New York. Benjamin F. Hawkins, Eugene S. Schoonmaker, and Robert A. Weinman were among his pupils. The list of his memberships and awards is almost as lengthy as that of his works.
