The Glasgow-born artist David Young Cameron is known primarily as a painter of evocative Scottish landscapes, but it was as an etcher that he first attracted a following in the 1890’s. The son of a minister father and amateur watercolourist mother, Cameron studied at the Glasgow School of art part-time while working in the offices of an iron foundry, later moving to Edinburgh to study art full-time. It was through an association with George Stevenson, an amateur etcher and friend of Sir Francis Seymour Haden, that Cameron first encountered the art of etching. He took to the medium enthusiastically, often printing and publishing his work himself, and produced over five hundred prints before giving up the medium in 1932. As with his paintings, Cameron’s landscape etchings favour moody effects over topographical accuracy. Mountain Tarn demonstrates Cameron’s interest in composition and his sensitive handling of line.