“ o give us nature, such as we see it, is well and deserving of praise; to give us nature, such as we have never seen, but have often wished to see it, is better, and deserving of higher praise.” These words of Hazlitt's seem to me particularly appropriate whenever I look at one of those enchantingly solemn pictures of the Scottish highland landscape in which Sir David Young Cameron, with the painter's means or the etcher's, shows us some aspect of loch and hills that has moved his spirit to fuse with his vision in the discovery of harmonies through which he reveals the inherent pictorial beauty. He has won to his eminence as both painter and etcher, because he has disciplined his art to distil in its expression the poetic significance as well as the pictorial truth of the thing he has seen with his inward and his outward eye, communicating in this way a fresh experience of natural beauty. Yet long comparatively as his pre-eminence among living landscape—painters has been recognised, the young artist had already won a very prominent position as an etcher, with more than three hundred and fifty plates to his name, when some two and twenty years ago he painted the impressive Dark Angers, which with its austere beauty first pointed definitely to his promise of mastery, and preluded a series of masterpieces, hall-marked with his personality, his romantic imagination, his artistic sincerity, dignity and majestic simplicity. Of these, four are among our reproductions, and perhaps another dozen may be distinguished as representing milestones on Cameron's steady march toward that place which has been so long assured to him among the master-etchers in the foremost rank. Already, before 1903, the year of the painting Dark Angers, my friend Frederick Wedmore, the first cataloguer of Meryon, the first important cataloguer of Whistler, had begun with enthusiasm to catalogue the etchings of Cameron, whom he regarded even then as “one of our modern masters,” but an etcher above all of architecture. This view of Cameron as preeminently the romantic etcher of picturesque and storied buildings has become traditional, though Wedmore's catalogue has, of course, been long superseded by the complete and authoritative work of Mr. Frank Rinder, who knows Cameron's etchings as few can know them. Not even Professor Arthur M. Hind, of the British Museum, with all his opportunities of study, has, in his valuable book “The Etchings of D. Y. Cameron,” written of them with greater critical acumen or more sympathetic appreciation of their qualities. I am glad to find myself in agreement with both these critics in believing that Cameron's [Pg 2]interpretation of landscape offers fuller scope for the authentic expression of his artistic self than his presentation of any building, however pictorially inspiring, however romantically appealing.
It was a water-colour drawing, not an etching, that first made me aware of D. Y. Cameron. This was, if memory serves me rightly, in the late eighties, in one of the exhibitions of the Royal Institute. I forget the title of the drawing, though the subject seems to recall itself as a street corner, yet I can remember exactly where it hung in the gallery, and there must have been some distinctive quality in the treatment that caused me to mark it for notice. But what seems curiously significant in the light of my later enthusiasm for the master's work was the unforgettable appeal made by the unknown young artist's name to my ear and to my eye, and I remember it was my whim to end my notice of the exhibition with the name that had caught my fancy with a sort of challenge in the sound of it—D. Y. Cameron. I knew nothing then of Cameron's etchings, although he was elected in 1889 an Associate of the Society of Painter-Etchers on the appeal of one of those bits of Scottish scenery he was already busily putting on to the copper, some of them distinctly Hadenish in derivation. Nor was I likely to be attracted to them particularly on that account, for at that time, I confess, I was completely under the spell of Whistler's genius, and for me etching meant paramountly Whistler's etching, not Haden's nor another's. Before ever the youthful Cameron had etched a plate, in fact the very year before his first—that was in 1886—I had been permitted to sit by the master's side watching him draw with his needle on the copperplate, had seen him ink, warm and wipe his plate for printing, and actually been entrusted with the proud privilege of turning the handle of his star-press. When, therefore, I became conscious of D. Y. Cameron as an etcher, it was probably the Whistlerian influence in some of the early plates one saw at the Painter-Etchers' exhibitions that distinguished them for me as the genuine utterances of a sincere young artist responsive to an inspiring enthusiasm for the master. But it was not till Wedmore showed me the plates of the “North Italian Set,” wrought in 1895, that I recognised in D. Y. Cameron a possible master in the making. Of course I saw Whistler in some of them, most obviously in the Venice from the Lido, and The Palace Doorway, but that counted to me for righteousness; Cameron was still following the gleam in searching for his own expression. Included in this set, however, were plates in which conception and manner seemed to me more authentically those of an etcher who was going to be very important. There was Timoret's House, an engagingly personal conception, there was Saint Mark's, Venice, a forerunner of great church[Pg 3] interiors, there was San Georgio Maggiore, there was Porta del Molo, Genoa, there was Pastoral, there was The Wine Farm. Probably I thought more of these thirty years ago than I do now, conscious now of the noble and beautiful achievements of his maturity, masterpieces which become one's spiritual possessions just as great poems do.
Cameron had been etching eight years when he arrived at his “North Italian Set.” He was twenty-two when he took up the needle, that was two years after he had begun to study in the Edinburgh School of Art with a definite view to an artist's career. Of course he had had such a career hopefully in mind when, during four years of patient drudgery in a commercial office in his native Glasgow, he had daily devoted a couple of hours before and after his clerical work to learning what he could of drawing and graphic methods in the local art school. Undaunted, while yet a boy, by the difficulties to be overcome, he won his emancipation from the office, and then bravely faced the long effort to command the means of self-expression in art. With Cameron this meant constant self-searching, self-discipline, for the artist in him was keenly sensitive to influences and the promptings of adventure, but purpose pointed ever steadily ahead. The young student's assiduous industry and readiness for fresh endeavour found stimulus, moreover, in the spiritual and romantic energy of the true-bred Cameron character which was his—the unyielding Cameron of the old song. For, as Mr. Rinder has told us, D. Y. Cameron is descended through his father, a minister of the Kirk, from Dr. Archibald Cameron, the historic Lochiel's brother, who played so important a part in helping Prince Charlie to escape after Culloden. It was Mr. George Stevenson, an amateur etcher and a friend of Seymour Haden, who initiated Cameron into the craft of etching and helped him with his earliest essays on the copper. The subjects of these were all Scotch towns or landscapes, and soon he was sending prints to the Painter-Etchers' exhibitions. In 1889 there came a set of twenty etchings known as the “Clyde Set,” noteworthy chiefly for the nice pictorial sense with which the etcher conceived the subjects, though there was little in the way of personal expression. Haden was writ large over them, and not least, perhaps, over Bothwell, the most favoured plate in the set, recording a scene that had surprised Wordsworth with the unexpected beauty of ancient Castle and harmoniously flowing Clyde. As Cameron's technical confidence grew with his pictorial capacity, plates of more distinctive interest were produced, such as Greenock, No. 2., The Tay at Kinfauns, White Horse Close, The Unicorn, Stirling, and the little Whistlerian “pieces,” as Wedmore would call them, Thames Warehouses, A Highland Kitchen,[Pg 4] and Greendyke Street. Passing over the etchings of old Glasgow buildings, done for the antiquarian rather than the pictorial interest, at the instance of the Regality Club of Glasgow, we come in 1892 to a notable group of plates recording things seen in the land of Rembrandt, and in certain of them deliberately reflecting the inspiration of the great Dutch master, in others that of the very vivacious Whistler, who had been etching in Holland only three years before. Twenty-two plates are labelled as the “North Holland Set.” Of these the most distinguished are Zaandam Windmills, a brave thing to do after Whistler's wonderful masterpiece Zaandam, yet a new and admirable conception of those famous windmills, which will always attract the etcher; The Flower Market, The Windmill, and Storm: Sundown, an imaginative vision of a Dutch landscape under a very angry sky. Other etchings of interest resulted from this Dutch visit which were not included in the “Set,” and chief of these was A Rembrandt Farm, a beautiful thing, with its inspiration as patent as its etcher's joy in the doing. With A Dutch Village too, and Haarlem, I fancy he felt that his visit had been worth while. Between these and the “North Italian Sets,” of which I have spoken, there came in The Palace: Stirling Castle, a more romantic vision of picturesque old building, and in A Border Tower and Lecropt serene and decorative aspects of landscape. After the “North Italian” there was no further “Set” till the “London,” but in the interim Cameron had given us several interesting things: The Smithy, which was to be far surpassed by Robert Lee's Workshop, (Plate V.) the stern-looking Old Houses, Rouen, Meryonic if you like, the attractively sunny Cour des Bons Enfants, Rouen, the amply conceived Broad Street, Stirling, unusually animated with incidental folk, and the charming landscape Ledaig, with its well-ordered design, and Ye Banks and Braes, in which we feel we are getting nearer to the authentic landscape conception of the Cameron we know to-day.
The “London Set” of 1899 at once raised Cameron to a higher plane in the esteem of print-lovers, for it showed him capable of such original, such admirable, pictorial interpretations of London architecture as The Admiralty, with its austere dignity, The Custom House, Waterloo Bridge, No. 2., Queen Anne's Gate, St. George's, Hanover Square, and an indisputable masterpiece in Newgate, (Plate I.) Because there is gloom here, because dark mysterious shadows contrast forcibly with the strong light that falls on the stern stone portal of the old prison, many people can never dissociate Cameron's incomparable etching of London's historic gaol from the idea of Meryon's Morgue, which, imaginatively appealing as it is,[Pg 5] and impressive in its design, depends for its tragic significance, less on the not very distinctive building that we happen to know is a mortuary, than on the incident of the corpse being carried up from the Seine. In Cameron's Newgate, on the other hand, the building itself is eloquent of its function and character in every feature, and so imaginatively stimulating is the etcher's authentic conception, appropriately austere in its expressive dignity of presentment, that there seems to be inherent in it the tragically pitiable significance of all prisoned humanity. That Newgate doorway, through which had passed so many generations of destiny's victims, always haunted my imagination, and when I first saw Cameron's great etching I felt again the sympathetic thrill that had been mine on hearing that dreadful door locked behind me, when in 1881 I was privileged—as a visitor—to go all over the prison, while it was still used as a house of detention and men and women were hanged there in a permanent execution shed. Yes, Newgate is a print that gives us with its decorative design, not a mere façade, as the majority of architectural etchings do, but a rich suggestion—and how significantly that sombre group of women by the grim portal aids it—of the haunting spirit of the place, with its terrible associations.
Always Cameron's interest in architecture had been wide in its range, stately or humble appealing alike, his graphic sympathies being moved particularly by the picturesque aspects of buildings, irrespective of their character, function or period, while romantic and dramatic expression would be discovered in emphasis of shadow decoratively balanced with contrasting light. With the Newgate he seemed to have developed a deeper intuition for the significant beauties of architecture, and in the etchings which followed a year later we find his pictorial conceptions more responsive to the rhythmical suggestions of contours and spaces, while his imaginative disposition of glowing lights and brooding shadows is emotionally provocative with romantic glamour, mysterious charm. For instance, Rosslyn, with the Gothic beauty of its chapel peered into, as it were, adoringly; Siena, with its houses folded in a light of some strange enchantment; The Rialto, brilliantly original with its frank decorative plan; Saint Marks, No. 2., with the glow of its great rose-window; the intriguing Venetian Street; and then the charming Palazzo Dario, (Plate II.) and Ca d'Oro, two gracious visions of palatial Venice, in which the etcher's needle has delicately responded to his pictorial conception of the decorative detail, while in Palazzo Dario, as Professor Hind has demonstrated, the pictorial design betters the architectural reality. Between these and the elegant Doge's Palace of 1902 must be mentioned the lovely[Pg 6] Elcho on the Tay, in which, with the harmonious expression of hilly shores and calm waters reflecting them, Cameron attained to his so far most beautiful interpretation of landscape. Laleham, however, of the same period has another kind of charm, the graphic mood and manner of the artist differing, as the inspiration of Thames differed from that of Tay.
Cameron came next under the spell of the historic cities of Touraine, and how inspiring he found them we see in an important group of etchings. Chartres, Tours, Loches, Chinon, Angers, Amboise, Blois, each offered him something that his art and his temperament seemed prepared for, subjects for the exercise of his own expressive style in the pictorial treatment of architecture mellowed by the centuries. If something of the expressiveness of this style depends on the forcible contrasts of light and shadow, akin to those that characterise Meryon's brooding visions of old Paris, Cameron's use of such emphasis is no reflection of Meryon's genius; it is personal to the Scottish master, belonging to his temperamentally romantic way of looking at buildings that interest him significantly. Without the continued appeal of associations charged with haunting memories, with romantic significance, the merely architectural aspects of any place would hardly have enticed Cameron to the copper, no matter what decorative pattern the shapes might suggest, what rhythmic harmony the contours and tones. His individuality was now definitely expressive, and it is interesting to compare the penetrating impressiveness of Cameron's splendid Loches and Amboise with the sketchy vivacity of impression in Whistler's Hotel de Ville, Loches, and Clock Tower, Amboise, respectively, where the same buildings had engaged the vision of both etchers, to see how entirely Cameron had freed himself from the old Whistlerian influence. The boldly designed Chinon too, and Angers, Rue des Filles Dieu, with its sombre quietude—whose conception other than Cameron's would have been so deeply emphatic with a chiaroscuro that seems to bring its lights and its darks from a poet's imagination?
St. Laumer, Blois, (Plate III.), as this lovely twelfth-century church was called till, after the Reign of Terror, it was reconsecrated with the name of St. Nicholas, has been chosen to represent here Cameron's etchings of church interiors, because, with the possible exception of the exquisite Five Sisters, York Minster, it appears to me the most beautiful of all in its complete harmony of design and expression, and it is less widely known than that later and more generally acclaimed masterpiece. Yet, in spite of the wonderfully emotional effect of the stained-glass window translucence in the Five Sisters, I cannot feel that the[Pg 7] general impression is more beautiful and inspiring pictorially than is that of St. Laumer, Blois, in which the artist's imagination has been reverentially moved, and religious aspiration is implicit in the noble design, the empty chairs facing the lofty choir being an eloquent factor. Architecture was, at this period, chiefly engaging Cameron's needle, aided often by the dry-point for enriching the tonal accent, and in Tours he found the subject of one of his most attractive plates of architectural character. This was Place Plumereau, Tours, (Plate IV.), and in this row of fifteenth-century houses, with the engaging variety of their fenestration, their gables, their quaintly inviting balconies and shop-fronts, he discovered an implicit picturesqueness which his fine instinct for essential design turned to good account.
The year 1904 brought the interesting “Paris Set,” which included three notable plates, Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, the belfry tower from which was sounded the signal to begin the Huguenot massacre in 1572, Hotel de Sens and Saint Gervais. Then followed John Knox's House, a characteristic presentment of an historic landmark of old Edinburgh, while in the same year, 1905, Cameron etched one of his finest interiors, Robert Lee's Workshop (Plate V.). This plate has a sentimental interest of association, for it represents the boat-builder's shed at Tweedmouth in which the celebrated Scottish church-reformer worked awhile with his father; but the pictorial interest is vested, in the homogeneous design into which the structural timbers and the materials and factors of the work in hand have been gathered, with the harmonious tonality of the vista along which the eye is led under the dark roof to the bright glimpse of boats and river, as it is led with similar motive of chiaroscuro, but with a suggestion of ambient mystery, in the slightly later Robin's Court. In both these plates the dry-point has subtly reinforced the bitten line.
The landscape mood was now alert, the mood especially for calm waters and darkly shadowed shores, seen pictorially and felt poetically under varying influences of light, and this serene mood was charmingly reflected in The Tweed at Coldstream, Murthly on the Tay, Moray Firth, Still Waters, Evening on the Garry, while Berwick on Tweed was a purely etcher's conception in which his line was boldly self-reliant in its thrifty sufficiency. Then Robin Hood's Bay; on the northern Yorkshire coast in that bay of romantic aspect and tradition, immemorially associated with the legendary Earl of Huntingdon, Cameron found inspiration for one of his most beautifully balanced designs, with the little houses piling up picturesquely on either bank of the gap, the sea calmly lapping the shore, and the hills sharing the[Pg 8] pervading sunshine. In this mood the etcher was ripe for a landscape masterpiece, and it was forthcoming with the “Belgian Set” of 1907. The Meuse (Plate VI.) is one of Cameron's supremely beautiful achievements; with exquisite symmetry the placid river is seen winding between its banks of overshadowing cliff, while the Citadel of Dinant majestically crowns the lovely scene, in which the distant prospect has a benign share. This for me is the outstanding plate of the “Belgian Set”—but there were also architectural plates of considerable importance and charm, such as Dinant, Old La Roche, The Gateway of Bruges, and Damme, in which glamour has been deliberately sought with a very sharp accent of chiaroscuro. Cameron's standard was now exceedingly high. In the same year as Robin Hood's Bay and the “Belgian Set,” came the superb Five Sisters, York Minster, of which I have already spoken, and two charming riparian landscapes, On the Ourthe and After-glow on the Findhorn.
A visit to Egypt in 1909 resulted in something of a change of manner, simplification rather, in the linear utterance of the master's pictorial conception. This is seen first in the exquisite line and synthetic simplicity of The Turkish Fort. Street in Cairo shows its influence also, and the remarkable still-life studies, Rameses II, My Little Lady of Luxor, and An Egyptian Mirror. The exercise of giving with the etched line pictorial life to inanimate figures seemed to fascinate Cameron, and having begun with The Little Devil of Florence, he went on to do A Queen of Chartres and Aquamanile, that brilliant representation in full tone of an amoured knight on horseback from a fourteenth-century brass. But, after all, The Little Devil of Florence may be regarded as but a preliminary essay for that far greater thing The Chimera of Amiens (Plate VII.), of 1910, which is one of the masterpieces of modern etching. Here from a corner of the beautiful Cathedral's battlement the dreadful winged monster, crouching above the sculptured figure of a medieval monk, cranes its long neck to glower with insatiable malevolence over the human generations below, but, unlike the morbid menace that Meryon's Le Stryge scatters on dark pinions over Paris, in Cameron's Chimera this stone creature of Gothic imagination glowers impotently, for “nothing but well and fair” shows in the sunny prospect of the city and country beyond. A charmingly original plate, Yvon, followed in 1911, etched, I presume, from the water-colour done in Chartres, and the etching, compared with the drawing, exemplifies Cameron's happy readiness to improve the balance of his design even at the expense of an obstructive actuality, for he removed a building to let in a glimpse of sky and landscape.[Pg 9]
This was characteristic, for now landscape was to be dominantly the inspiring motive of the master's work upon copper as upon canvas, and it was to be the landscape of his native land. The year 1911, which saw Cameron elected an Associate Engraver of the Royal Academy, was signalised by the production of the famous Ben Ledi, an unforgettable plate of rare beauty, in which he has given us a poetic vision of that noble mountain of immemorial romantic tradition, with a light of enchantment upon it and upon the near waters, lending a glimmer to the solemn enfolding shadows. Of all Cameron's etchings this is the most highly appraised in the print market, yet with all its tranquil beauty, it does not excel in the essentials of the etcher's expression some others of his Scottish landscapes in which with more simple, more summary linear treatment he has achieved a pictorial impression organically true with no less beauty and charm. Look, for instance, at Dinnet Moor, (Plate VIII.) how the searching lines have found in a natural rhythm all the organic features of that fine tract of richly-heathered moorland on Deeside, while the dry-point's burr has given them their pictorial accents, and the pale contours of the distant Grampians suggest all the implicit beauty of the mountains enveloped in sunny haze. Of kindred conception and charm are Ralia, Nithsdale, Carselands, Loch-en-Dorb, The Cairn-gorms, Hills of Tulloch, Dunstaffnage, The Frews, and in each of these the natural scene has offered its own rhythms, the artists vision ordering them into harmonies with evocation of beauty from the delicate play of light with answering shadow, perhaps on a winding river, perhaps on a valley's gentle undulations, on the majestic shapes of dominant hills, on the calm surface of a sheltered lake. Then, the delightful Dunvalanree, what a triumph for the all-sufficiency of the bitten line! The Esk, a little dry-point of peculiar charm, with what simple expressiveness of line the river is shown winding between its low-lying shores “somewhere safe to sea!” Those plates too, in which Cameron's vision of rocky crags is presented with so sound a structural intuition, Peeks of Arran, Kerrera, The Valley (Glencrutten), how convincingly their lines tell!
All these things were done between 1912 and 1916. In that year Cameron was exceptionally honoured by the Royal Academy. His genius for painting was now recognised to be as important as his genius for etching, and by a fresh election he attained the full privilege of a Painter Associate. In the next year he wrought three distinguished plates, one still life, Maut, one architectural, Old Museum, Beauvais, and one landscape, the lovely Strathearn, (Plate IX.) in which his pictorial poetry found exquisite expression. After 1917,[Pg 10] however, Cameron laid aside his etching-needle and dry-point for six years, during which he was painting pictures that established his mastery and his fame, and justly won him the full honours of the Royal Academy. In 1923 he returned to the copper with fresh enthusiasm, and in the very beautiful Ben Lomond (Plate X.), with its flawless balance of design, he reached what seems to me his high-water mark in landscape etching. Here storied mountain and loch, in their harmonious relation under a romantic enchantment of light, seem with their rhythm of form and tone to sing from the copper a lyric of pure beauty. When I look at this and the charming Loch Ard (Plate XII.) of last year, and the fascinatingly designed Lake Menteith of this, in all of which the placid charm of still water has been an inspiring element, and then think of Cameron's many etchings in which some riparian aspect has been the motive, I am reminded how Wordsworth, after a visit to Scotland, distinguished between the beauties of river and lake: “The beauties of a brook or river must be sought, and the pleasure is in going in search of them; those of a lake or of the sea come to you of themselves.” Whether he seeks them, whether they “come of themselves,” the artist who can communicate the beauties as Sir D. Y. Cameron communicates them with pictorial magic is the rare master. No less rare is the imaginative mood that gave us this magnificent print, The Baths of Caracalla (Plate XI.) the etcher having found inspiration for a masterpiece of impressive design, in the ruins of the famous Thermæ which pandered to all the extravagant luxuriousness of decadent Rome, ruins which Shelley found incomparable in their “sublime and lovely desolation,” inherently decorative and charged with Time's stern significance. The mention of decorative and significant qualities reminds me that I have said nothing of Sir David's fine and distinctive bookplates, of which he has done many; but now that he has taken up his etching-needle again we may hope for noble things of various kinds. All the honours and distinctions that have come to the master from Academies, Societies, University, the State, the Sovereign, are but synonyms for that artistic honour which is the true inwardness of any work that bears the name of D. Y. Cameron.
Malcolm C. Salaman.