His father Karl Oswald Lindner (1844-1919) [2] ran a business that made stylish canes and parasol handles, and employed almost 300 craftsmen.

During World War I (1914–1918) Lindner volunteered in 1915 to join a mountaineer regiment of the Austrian army.

[4] He also helped in the family firm [5] and engaged in a mineral water and sugar confectionery company with his brother Paul that failed.

In order to collect money for his trip to Canada, he obtained expensive cameras per delivery note and cashed them in a pawn shop.

[1] Lindner began to teach at the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate in 1931, first giving a night course and then became a full-time instructor.

[4] It was through the influence of Lindner and Kenderdine that the University of Saskatchewan began to run its annual Emma Lake Artist's Workshops.

[5] Some of the prominent Modernist painters of New York were guests at the Emma Lake Workshops in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and influenced Lindner's style.

[6] In 1959 Lindner returned to Vienna and attended the Akademie der Angewandten Kunst, where he took a master's course in etching and stone lithography.

[citation needed] Lindner is known for his many watercolors inspired by the natural beauty of the wooded country around his summer home at Emma Lake.

He depicted the forest floor from close quarters, with highly textured patterns of surface detail from the fallen branches, tree stumps, moss and lichen.

[6] His watercolors of the tangled forest interior were sharply focused, highly keyed and executed with great skill.

[1] Clement Greenberg conducted an Emma Lake Artists' Workshop in 1962 in which Lindner participated.

Greenberg wrote in an introduction to an exhibition of Linder's work in Regina in 1962–1963, Lindner's art excels by the truth of its color as well as of its drawing and design.

I find more imagination and modernity in Ernest Lindner's sharply focused rendering of a tree trunk than in the largest part of current abstract painting.

From April 2007 the studio, surrounded by a 48 hectares (120 acres) mixed wood forest, has been recognized as a Provincial Heritage Property.