21. David Young Cameron
(1865-1945)
Ben Lomond

(click on image to print)
Cameron, Ben Lomond

Ben Lomond

Etching and drypoint, 1923, 260 x 410 mm., Rinder (Suppl.) 468 iv/vi. Superb impression on old laid paper with good margins, signed in pencil and from the total printing of about eighty impressions. Ben Lomond is one of the iconic prints of the British Etching Revival, an image so often reproduced and so familiar that one needs to look at it afresh, as if one had never seen it before, to appreciate its subtleties.: the alternating passages of dark and light rising toward the hills, the boat and the buildings tucked in along the shore and in the darkened hills, most of all, the sunlit cloud resting on the hills just to the left of the peak and its oh-so-subtle reflection in the water, achieved entirely by wiping of the plate tone. It is a print that well deserves its fame. This is a rare impression of the fourth state, before the plate signature and before the outlining of the hill behind the cloud, fresh and beautiful in appearance and with all the brooding mystery that Cameron, at his best, could convey so well. Pushed aside for decades by critical espousal of modern art, such prints await re-appraisal as evidence of a different aesthetic path.