Artists

Edgar Spier Cameron

American, 1862-1944

Born in Ottawa, Illinois, Edgar Cameron was a student at the old Chicago Academy of Design and continued on at its successor the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts through 1881. He then entered the Art Student's League in New York to study with William Merritt Chase and Thomas Wilmer Dewing. As was common for talented artists of the day he traveled to Paris for further study at the Academie Julian and Ecole des Beaux-Arts where a proficiency exam in French was required for admission. In 1884 he entered the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, which upon his return to Chicago took him into a career in mural and interior decoration; one such work being at the massive Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.

His advanced knowledge of art enabled him to maintain a job as art critic at the Chicago Tribune for fourteen years until he left in 1905. Cameron completed dozens of murals, his last completed in 1932 at the First National Bank of Oklahoma City when he was seventy years old. Several of his portraits are in a wide variety of institutions in Chicago and the Chicago Historical Society holds a number of his works. Edgar Cameron continued to travel through France and produced a number of landscapes from those journeys. In 1925 and 1928 he was in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A truly well-rounded artist in all media, he was also an avid watercolorist and pastelist, having been one of the original founders of the Pastelists club in Chicago.