In 1893, when Watson’s career was in full bloom, he took advantage of his comfortable income to build a long-needed studio addition onto his house. He decorated it and the adjoining original studio with a painted frieze that still runs along the full length of the walls, immediately below the ceiling.

Watson believed that all worthwhile art was grounded in tradition. His studio frieze offers visual confirmation of that conviction by paying homage to the European painters he—and the majority of other Canadian landscape painters—most admired.