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[Page 1]
[Library information]
[Transcribers note:
James MacDonald left Australia for London in 1898 to attend the Westminster School of Art and then spent five years in Paris then moved to New York. He enlisted in the 5th Battalion AIF and served at Gallipoli as a private and on 26 April 1915 he was wounded in the abdomen and was classified unfit for active service. He served as a pay sergeant from 1916-1917 in England. In 1918 he worked as a camouflage artist with the 5th Division in France and was medically discharged from the army in April 1919. Returning to Australia, MacDonald took up art study, publishing works on various Australian artists then having given up painting, from 1923 he was art critic for The Melbourne Herald.
Macdonald writes entertainingly and observes things as an artist, although he feels he should have been an officer and was often dissatisfied, illustrated in the following extract: "the probation has turned out, for me at any rate, to be just the thing to inhibit good work, not only because such a period inevitably tends to make a man nervous, from anxiety to do his best, but on account of the many changes and the consequent reluctance to begin work that cannot be completed; the lack of accommodation; the looking after traps; the want of help and the insignificance of one's non-commissioned self all of which tend to limit production: both as to quality and quantity."]