Lineage of Forrest · Scottish · 1865 to 1945

Sir David Young Cameron

The Scottish etching revival at its height: cathedrals as masses of dark, a few lit windows.

Cameron was the most celebrated Scottish etcher of Forrest's lifetime, a Glasgow man who trained in Edinburgh and became a Royal Academician, a knight, and the King's Painter and Limner in Scotland. His architectural plates, the Five Sisters of York, Ben Ledi, the Chimera of Amiens, the Palace at Stirling, sold for extraordinary prices in the etching boom of the 1920s, the same decade Forrest turned to the needle.

What he does that a beginner can use is value design on a building. A Cameron interior is two or three enormous dark masses, a single plane of light, and a few lines of tracery drawn with a draughtsman's exactness. The detail is real but it is never allowed to break the big shape. He also drew in pencil and chalk with the same economy, and his small drypoints of Scottish towns are close cousins of Forrest's closes.

Art Institute of Chicago

D. Y. Cameron, The Palace Doorway, plate 22 from the North Italian Set, 1895. Etching on ivory laid paper.

The Art Institute of Chicago · Bryan Lathrop Collection

What to steal

1Design the building as masses of dark before you draw a single moulding.
2One lit plane. Everything else is a step darker than it, and nothing competes.
3Tracery as exact line inside an inexact mass: precision where it counts, nowhere else.