Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is considered one of the most significant portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. She also produced sensitive portraits of women and children.
Background
Julia Margaret Cameron (nee Pattle) was born on June 11, 1815 in Calcutta, West Bengal, India to Adeline Marie de l'Etang and James Peter Pattle. Julia was the fourth of ten children and one of seven to survive to adulthood; three of her siblings died as infants.
Education
The seven Prattle sisters - known for being close, outspoken, and nontraditional in behavior and dress (and for their "charm, wit and beauty") - were all sent to France as children to be educated. Julia lived there with her maternal grandmother from 1818 to 1834, after which she returned to India.
Career
Julia Margaret Cameron showed an interest in photography in the late 1850s and there are indications that she experimented with making photographs in the early 1860s. Around 1863, her daughter and her son-in-law gave her her first camera (a sliding-box camera) as a Christmas present. The gift was meant to provide a diversion while her husband was in Ceylon tending to his coffee plantations. After receiving the camera, she cleared out a chicken coop and converted it into studio space. On 29 January 1864 she photographed 9‐year‐old Annie Philpot, an image she described as her "first success".
That same year, she compiled albums of her images for Watts and Herschel, registered her work and prepared it for exhibition and sale, and was elected to the Photographic Society of London, where she remained a member until her death and where she displayed work at yearly exhibitions.
In 1865, Julia became a member of the Photographic Society of Scotland and arranged to have her prints sold through the London dealers P. & D. Colnaghi. She presented a series of photographs, The Fruits of the Spirit, to the British Museum, and held her first solo exhibition in November 1865. Her prints generated robust demand and she showed her work throughout Europe, securing awards in Berlin in 1865 and 1866, and an honourable mention in Dublin.
In August 1865, the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, purchased 80 of her photographs. Three years later, the museum offered her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, essentially making her the museum's first artist-in-residence.
Julia Margaret Cameronproduced images of Thomas Carlyle and John Herschel in 1867. By 1868, she was generating sales through P. & D. Colnaghi and a second London agent, William Spooner. In 1869, she produces The Kiss of Peace, which she considers her finest work.
In the early 1870s, Cameron's work matured. Her elaborate illustrative tableaus involving religious, literary, and classical figures peaked in a series of images for Tennyson's Idylles of the King, published in 1874 and 1875, evidently at her expense. During this time, she also wrote Annals of my Glass House, an unfinished memoir recounting her photographic career.
In October 1873, her daughter died in childbirth. Two years later, because of her husband's ill health, because of the lower cost of living, and to be nearer to their sons who managed the family coffee plantations (which had been badly harmed by a fungus), she and her husband left Freshwater for Ceylon with "a cow, Cameron’s photographic equipment, and two coffins, in case such items should not be available in the East". The move effectively marked the end of Cameron's photography career; she took few photographs afterwards, mostly of Tamil servants and workers. Fewer than 30 images survive from this period. Cameron's output may have dropped in part because of the difficulty working with collodion in the insect-friendly heat where fresh water was less available for washing prints.
In February 1876, Macmillan's Magazine published her poem, On a Portrait. The following year, her image The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere appeared on the cover Harper's Weekly as a wood engraving.
After a short visit to England six months earlier, Cameron fell ill with a dangerous chill and died on 26 January 1879 at the Glencairn estate in Ceylon. It is often reported that her last word was "Beauty" or "Beautiful".
In her 12-year career, Cameron produced around 900 photographs.
(Julia Margaret Cameron called this 29 January 1864 portra...)
1864
King David
(Sir Henry Taylor as King David)
1866
My Grand Child Archie Son of Eugene Cameron R.A
(Aged 2 Years & 3 Months)
The Kiss of Peace
Alfred Lord Tennyson
1869
Cupid & Psyche
Julia Stephen
Paul and Virginia
Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere
1874
Julia Jackson
Saint Cecilia, After the Manner of Raphael
Beatrice
Henry Thoby Prinsep
Sir John Herschel
1867
Ellen Terry
Charles Hay Cameron
Views
Quotations:
"Beauty, you're under arrest. I have a camera, and I'm not afraid to use it."
"I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied."
"From the first moment, I handled my lens with a tender ardor, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigor."
"I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass."
"I believe in other than mere conventional topographic photography—map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form."
Membership
In 1864 Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. She remained a member of the Photographic Society, London, until her death.
Photographic Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1864 - 1879
Personality
Cameron was distinguished by her boundless generosity, her ardent enthusiasms, and later, by her artistic talents. She was known for her love of bestowing lavish gifts upon her friends, as well as for her ardent, prolific letter-writing.
Connections
In 1838 Julia married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law Commission stationed in Calcutta, who was twenty years her senior. In December of that same year, they gave birth to their first child. Between 1839 and 1852, they had six children, one of whom was adopted. In all, the Camerons raised 11 children, five of her own, five orphaned children of relatives, and an Irish girl named Mary Ryan who they found begging on Putney Heath and whom Cameron used as a model in her photographs. Their son, Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, would also become a photographer.
Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography
British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron has been described as one of the Finest portraitists of the nineteenth century-in any medium. Raised in a well-connected and creative family, Cameron led an unconventional life for a woman of the Victorian age. After devoting herself to an artistic and literary salon at her home on the Isle of Wight and raising eleven children, Cameron took up photography in her late forties. Over the next fourteen years, she produced more than a thousand strikingly original and often controversial images. This biography casts new light on the artist's links with the leading cultural figures of her time and on the techniques she used to achieve her distinctive style.
Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron was almost 50, & practically self-taught, when she took up photography seriously, yet she produced some of the most innovative & visually striking portraits of her time. Her novel use of lighting & focus transformed portraiture & helped secure the acceptance of photography as an expressive art.
2006
From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography
A depiction of the esteemed Victorian portrait photographer describes her marriage to Charles Hay Cameron, her affectionate correspondence with scientist Sir John Herschel, the technologies that shaped her career, and her work as chronicled by niece Virginia Woolf.
Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs
According to one of Julia Margaret Cameron's great-nieces, "We never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did any one else." This is an accurate summation of the life of the British photographer, who took up the camera at age forty-eight and made more than a thousand images over the next fourteen years. Living at the height of the Victorian era, Cameron was anything but conventional, experimenting with the relatively new medium of photography, promoting her art through exhibitions and sales, and pursuing the eminent men of her time (Tennyson, Herschel, Carlyle, etc.) as subjects for her lens. For the first time, all known images by Cameron, one of the most important nineteenth-century artists in any medium, are gathered together in a catalogue raisonné.
Women Photographers: From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman
This thorough and accessible introduction to the greatest women photographers from the 19th century to today features the most important works of 55 artists, along with in-depth biographical and critical assessments.