Studio: international art (36.1906)

I). Y. Cameron

is the question my readers secretly want to have
answered, and which it is therefore my business to
answer—within certain limits. The very young
student favours an intimate description of personal
peculiarities with a photograph of the genius in the
act of creation, and hopes by careful imitation of
his peculiar cut of hair and beard to develop in
time a like genius. This hope is a mirage, and
even if Mr. Cameron were willing to assist me, I
could not pander to it. Nor am I entirely at the
service of the more advanced student who demands
biographical details, scanning them closely to glean
the secrets of success—“ How did he first attract
attention?” “Was he well known before he was
thirty ? ” (this not without uneasy personal com-
parisons). These are matters for the experts of the
daily press, and their discussion is somewhat out of
place in an artistic periodical, which should seek
the causes for an artist’s eminence only in the

inherent qualities of his work. Within these limits,
however, I am entirely at the service of my public,
and Mr. Cameron having asked that this article
should be written by some one personally unknown
to him, and having expressly absolved me from
the obligation of writing nothing but praise, these
few pages may at least have the interest of an
impartial examination—the more so that, while I
admire his work, I find it by no means destitute of
elements to which I am temperamentally antago-
nistic. Still, that is really rather an advantage
than otherwise. Never mind his feelings : I serve
the public.

At the outset one may submit that the art in
which Mr. Cameron has most effectively made
himself felt—that of etching—is in its essence a base
compromise, the finely abstract art of the line
engraver being, as it were, diluted — made less
exacting by the use of lines of such varying weight:

“STIRLING CASTLE”

BY D. Y. CAMERON