This weekend, The Vashon-Maury Island Heritage Association and Heritage Museum are launching an exhibition of works by Norman Stewart Edson, a photographer who made his home on Vashon from 1921 to 1968.

Edson is best known for his many scenic shots around the Northwest and depictions of Mount Rainier, including his most famous work, “Sun’s Last Glow,” a photograph of the mountain framed by fir trees produced in a variety of media throughout his career.

The museum will show approximately 100 of Edson’s framed works, courtesy of two Northwest Edson collectors. The bulk of the show comes from the largest known Edson collector, Bill Taylor of Edmonds.

Taylor, a semi-retired management consultant, found his first Edson work, a photograph of trillium shot in its native forest setting, when he set out to decorate his new offices in 1980. Taylor soon had a passion for Edson’s work, and today he owns several hundred pieces. He is loaning about 20 percent of that collection to the museum for the show.

The other portion of the exhibit comes from Tim Johnson of Bellevue, a member of the board for the Eastside Heritage Center who began collecting Edson photographs 25 years ago. He says he was taken with the high quality of Edson’s work and a love of the subjects Edson chose to photograph. He is contributing 20 pieces to the exhibit.

Edson, son of painter Allan Edson, was born in 1876 in Quebec, Canada, and in his youth studied painting in Paris. In 1904 he traveled to Everett and after a series of odd jobs apprenticed under photographer Bert J. Bush.

Eventually, Edson opened his own studio in Everett and took his camera around logging camps and onto the Tulalip reservation to find subjects for his work. When the economy turned sour in 1907, he returned to Quebec, working as a photograper for over a decade in Montreal. In that time, he perfected the art of tinting scenic photographs and other techniques.

In 1921, Edson found his way to Vashon, where he opened a studio next to his home in Burton. There he created the body of works that constituted his legacy as a multimedia artist, including photographs rendered in Goldtone, Rayochrome and Pyrochrome, as well as those he hand-tinted. He printed some works on rice paper and interpreted many of his own photographs as pen and ink drawings and oil paintings.

Edson was also a violinist, poet and writer and with his own printing press produced small volumes of poetry, postcards, greeting cards and cedar-bound booklets of poems.