Nocturne

Though somewhat forgotten, Edgar Spier Cameron was in his day distinguished as artist, critic, and leader in the art community. As a boy growing up in Ottawa, Illinois, he worked in a glass factory, where he learned to make colored glass. He studied a traditional and rigorous art curriculum, beginning at the Chicago Academy of Design, next the New York Art Students League in 1882, and later in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in 1884. While in Paris, he married fellow artist Marie Gelon and exhibited in the Paris Salon as early as 1888. In 1900, he won a silver medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle. Returning from Paris, he garnered the position of art critic with the Chicago Tribune, casting his opinions on fellow-artists and penning lengthy commentary on the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Feeling torn between writing and art, he gave up the newspaper and devoted himself solely to art.

Mural painting became his specialty, beginning with a collaborative work on the massive cyclorama, the Chicago Fire, around 1891. For the Chicago 1893 Columbian Exposition, he worked with artist Robert Reid (also in the Club’s collection) on the dome of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and produced panels for the Transportation Building. His talent duly noted, Cameron received numerous commissions for murals in theatres, among them the Orpheum and Randolph, and even a Greek restaurant! His designs were so ingenious , he and a colleague applied for a patent in 1905 for a device used in the transformation of theater scenery. He sedulously painted portraits and landscapes in his studio and residence at 558 East Division Street (1896-1911) and at the Tree Studio Building (1913-23).

This evocative work Nocturne won the Municipal Arts prize in the 1926 Chicago Artist’s Exhibition of the Art Institute. A Parisian cityscape, it depicts the romantic charm of the mansard-roofed homes along the River Seine near the Pont-Neuf. Cameron broadly painted the architecture, shunning exactitude in order to arrive at a mood rather than a specific place.

Sally Metzler, Ph.D., Director of the Art Collection