[6] On her return to the United States in the late 1880s, Lawson opened a sculpture studio in New York.
[7] She worked in a Neoclassical style in both marble and bronze, and her sculpture was often compared to that of Harriet Hosmer, who also studied in Rome.
Originally placed near his home on the Lower East Side, it now stands in Tompkins Square Park.
[9] Two of her marble pieces have literary origins: Ayacanora is a life-size statue of the Indian heroine of Charles Kingsley's 1855 novel Westward Ho!, while The Origin of the Harp refers to a poem of the same title by the Irish poet Thomas Moore.
In 1886, one of her marble sculptures, The Shepherd, was ruined when the ship bringing it from Italy to the United States, the French steamship Burgundia, sank after a collision with the Italian man-of-war Italia in the Bay of Naples.