Ernest W. Watson was born to Daniel and Lucinda Moody Watson in Conway, Massachusetts on January 14, 1884. He graduated from the Massachusetts Normal School of Art in Boston in 1906, and received his teacher education degree the following year from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Watson was a painter, illustrator, instructor, author, and printmaker who specialized in drawing, watercolor, and color linoleum cuts.

In 1915, Watson co-founded the Berkshire Summer School of Art in Monterey, Massachusetts where he remained active in teaching summer sessions until 1927. He was a member of the Prairie Print Makers, the Rochester Print Club, the National Sculpture Society, the Society of Illustrators, and the Salmagundi Club of New York City. Besides serving as editor of American Artist, Watson authored instructional books including Art of Pencil Drawing, Composition in Landscape and Still Life, Creative Perspective for Artists and Illustrators, Linoleum Block Printing, Color and Method in Painting, and Ernest W. Watson's Sketch Diary.

Watson received that Gari Melchers Memorial Medal from the Artist's Fellowship in 1959. During the winter of 1962, Ernest and his second wife, Eve Brian, were awarded scholarships to the Huntington Hartford Foundation in Pacific Palisades, California where he completed work on The Watson Drawing Book.

The work of Ernest W. Watson is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; the La Salle University Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas.

Ernest W. Watson died on 23 January 1969 in New Rochelle, New York.