Old Houses, Byres Road, Partick

Glasgow: Regality Club, 1894. Etching on cream laid paper with a poppy watermark, 4 1/2 x 5 7/8 inches (115 x 148 mm) full margins. Notations in the margins recto, well outside of image area. Scattered very minor light brown foxing in the right-side sheet quadant, virtually invisible on recto.

[Rinder 191]. The son of a clergyman, Sir David Young Cameron was born in Glasgow in 1865. After a brief and unhappy dalliance in the fields of business and law, Cameron began attending the prestigious Glasgow School of the Arts in 1881, and later the Edinburgh School of the Arts. At first associated with the Glasgow Boys (John Lavery, Joseph Crawhall and James Guthrie), Young gained notoriety as an etcher, and by the 1890s he was internationally recognized, and had been elected to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers.

In 1899, having married, Cameron and his wife moved to the Scottish Highlands, where he switched his focus from interior scenes to architectural and landscape compositions. His feathery line etching technique married beautifully with the dramatic landscape of the Highlands, and his compositions are delicate studies of light and shadow that capture both the softness and the severity of the atmospheric skies, rocky outcroppings, and mossy ruins that surrounded him. Many of these compositions focus on a central shadow, or an emanating light, and show the influence of Francis Seymour Haden, James McNeil Whistler, and Charles Meryon.

In 1901 Cameron joined the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, an organization that had been founded 1898 by Whistler. He had exhibited with the society from the date of its inception, and later served on its council. In 1917 Cameron was commissioned by the Canadian government to serve as the Official War Artist. Among the numerous prestigious appointments that Cameron held during the course of his career, he was elected Trustee of the Tate Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery from 1921 to 1927, and was Knighted in 1924. He was given the title of King's Painter and Limner in 1933.

Cameron produced over 500 prints, primarily etchings and drypoints during his life, and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, the National Gallery of Scotland, the National Gallery of Canada, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Cameron died in Perth, Scotland, in 1945.