Studio: international art (36.1906)

D. Y. Cameron

design but one-half of nature, the half precisely that
seems to him the fine one. To this class belongs
Mr. Cameron, whose talent is not genially inclusive,
but distinguished, and who owes his success to that
very fact.

Now here my reader, if he has followed my argu-
ment, will pull me up short, declaring that the
man with a definite bent usually encounters as much
opposition as encouragement; and, indeed, this is
true enough. You are familiar in conversation with
the tiresome person who, no matter what proposi-
tion you raise, produces at once a complementary
one equally true in the opposite sense. The world
is that tiresome person for the man with a definite
message, and there is only one way to checkmate
it. That way is so to divine its needs as to find
something to say that has been forgotten, and the
complementary to which is already so oppressively
in the very atmosphere of the time as to be quite
too stale for restatement—to say, in fact, the fresh
and useful thing that cuts a way out of stagnation.
This is what Mr. Cameron has very largely done,
and in so doing has served well his time, which is
quite another thing from being a time-server. In a
milieu given over to naturalistic composition and
lucky sketching he restated the value of a more
formal design and a more studied completeness
of execution. In exhibitions where half the
works stopped carefully short at the point where
difficulty (and interest) began, he stood out as
having the persistence to push his work beyond
that point without toppling over into the category
of open failure which included most of the remain-
ing exhibits. He stood out as a man who could, at
any rate, do something definite, complete, and not

to be neglected—and such revival of competence
was sadly needed at a time when artistic standards
tended to amateurishness, alike from the narrow
conventions quickly exhausted of the “ schools ”
most in favour and from the ignorant ambitions of
individuals outside them. To show that hard work
need not be inartistic, that conventions need not
be inelastic, has been a service to other artists, for
which they are grateful. I do not deny that, in
steering as he has done so admirably between
extremes, he seems to me sometimes in his painting
to lean on the side of convention, to have even
sometimes remained a little self-consciously within
the limits of what he knows he can harmonise.
My own predilection being rather for the man who
risks failure more often, I prefer, on the whole, his
etchings, where he fails as rarely but wades deeper
in. But this is a personal preference, and for my
readers’ benefit I may point out that he would not
have been so successful had he erred the other way,
nor so useful to his time. The credit of modern
art was shaken, and' the few painters who have
drawn into their defences and been careful to
give to every work they showed an intrinsic value
have on the whole deserved well of their confreres.
Already artistic opinion is less disintegrated, less
anarchic, and in the process of settling men’s minds
as to what is and what is not sound art the works
of Mr. Cameron have had a very perceptible
influence.

The care to be successful in his undertakings
which characterises Mr. Cameron inspires con-
fidence, and looking to the future one cannot but
hope that he will utilise his position for the in-
auguration of some kind of colour-printing art,

“ THE BRIDGE ”

(In the Royal PinaJ-cothek, Munich)

D. Y. CAMERON

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