Montague Dawson was a renowned British maritime painter. His most famous paintings depict sailing ships, usually clippers or warships of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was the son of a keen yachtsman and the grandson of the marine painter Henry Dawson (1811-1878). Much of his childhood was spent on Southampton Water where he was able to indulge his interest in the study of ships. For a brief period around 1910 Dawson worked for a commercial art studio in Bedford Row, London, but with the outbreak of the First World War he joined the Royal Navy. Whilst serving with the Navy in Falmouth he met Charles Napier Hemy (1841–1917), who considerably influenced his work.
Towards the end of the war, Dawson was serving as a Lieutenant RNVR in the Dazzle Painting Section at Leith. In 1924 Dawson was the official artist for an Expedition to the South Seas by the steam yacht St George. During the expedition he provided illustrated reports to the Graphic magazine. During these years his artwork was also published in the newspaper The Sphere.
After the war, Dawson established himself as a professional marine artist, concentrating on historical subjects and portraits of deep-water sailing ships often in stiff breezes or on high seas. During the Second World War, he was employed as a war artist and again worked for The Sphere. Dawson exhibited regularly at the Royal Society of Marine Artists, of which he became a member, from 1946 to 1964, and occasionally at the Royal Academy between 1917 and 1936. By the 1930s he was considered one of the greatest living marine artists, whose patrons included two American Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the British Royal Family. Works by Dawson are held in the collecitons of the Royal Naval Museum and the National Maritime Museum.