Submitted by Al …
(Adapted from The Encyclopedia of Photography ©1963)
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in India on June 11, 1815, the third daughter of the Bengal civil servant James Pattle and his French-born wife. In 1838 Julia married Charles Hay Cameron, fourth member of the Council of Calcutta. Ten years later, she moved to England with her family. They first settled in London, later in Putney, and in 1860 in Freshwater Bay (Isle of Wright). In 1875 the couple returned to India. Mrs. Cameron died in Ceylon on January 26, 1879.
In about 1863 Julia Cameron turned her attention to photography, after she had received a camera and photographic equipment from one of her married daughters. The portrait of a young girl, dated 1864, is inscribed ‘Annie, my first success.’ Between 1864 and 1875, Mrs. Cameron produced her photographic work consisting of great portraits as well as allegorical, religious, illustrative, and genre pictures.
‘Dimbola’, the Cameron house in Freshwater Bay (now a museum and gallery), was the center of a select circle comprising many outstanding scientists, poets, musicians, painters, and actors of the middle Victorian era. Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose house was in the vicinity of the Cameron home, Sir John Herschel, Sir Henry Taylor, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Browning, Joseph Joachim, Ellen Terry, and many others were members of her circle. All these friends were photographed by Mrs. Cameron, a great number of them more than once. Sir Henry Taylor, one of her favourites, is said to have been portrayed by Cameron at least fifty times. These unusually large portraits, mostly heads or half-length pictures are beside the works of Hill and Adamson, the most precious contribution to early pictorial photography in England.
Cameron’s allegorical, religious, and genre pictures are far more problematic than her portraits, since for the most part they trespass the natural limits of photography. The titles of some of these fateful pictures are The Angel at the Sepulchre (above), The Wise and the Foolish Virgins, The Kiss of Peace, Venus Chiding Cupido and Removing His Wings, and King Lear Allotting His Kingdom. As models for these pictures she used her husband, Sir Henry Taylor, her painter friend G.F. Watts and his children, her daughters and niece, and her maid Mary Hillier.
In 1875, her book Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems was published in London. These works are undoubtedly influenced by the paintings and drawings of Mrs. Cameron’s friends and Pre-Raphaelite artists, such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, G.F. Watts, and Holman Hunt. On the other hand, there is no doubt that her photographs, in turn, influenced the creations of these painters.
Mrs. Cameron used two different poorly defining landscape lenses for her out-of-focus pictures. But it is very likely too, that in printing her pictures she put a piece of glass between the paper and the negative in order to get the soft and picturesque effect she desired. At first, her ‘poetical but badly manipulated’ photographs were not appreciated because of their technical defects, which were for the most part deliberate ‘fuzziness’. At that time, sympathetic criticisms were rather rare. ‘Mrs. Cameron’s portraits are admirable, expressive, vigorous, but dreadfully opposed to photographic conventionalities and properties. They are the more valuable for being so’. Although P.H. Emerson estimated her works very highly, comparing them with pictures by Velasquez and Rembrandt, they were criticized by H.P. Robinson because of their technical insufficiency.
‘She was, in fact, a Whistler in photography’, an anonymous lady amateur wrote of her. G.F. Watts inscribed one of her pictures (The Dream, above) as ‘quite divine’.
About another (Florence, above), he said ‘I wish I could paint such a picture as this.’
In 1864, a series of Mrs. Cameron’s photographs was exhibited for the first time at the 10th Exhibition of the Photographic Society in London. In 1865 through 1868, and 1873, she was represented again in London exhibitions. She sent her pictures to exhibitions in Edinburgh, Dublin, Berlin, Paris, and Vienna. Retrospective exhibitions containing her works were held in London, Vienna, and Hamburg. She was introduced to America by the periodical Camera Work (No 41, 1913) and through the exhibition of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1915.
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The majority of Mrs. Cameron’s negatives were destroyed by fire. New prints of her pictures were made by A.L. Coburn and the Autotype Company of London. Besides a translation of Burger’s ballad Lenore (London, 1847) and some poems, she wrote an auto-biographical fragment, ‘The Annals of My Glass House’, published in The Photographic Journal (Vol 67, 1927).
Collections of Julia Cameron’s works, for the most part signed and inscribed as original graphic prints, are to be found at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Photographic Society, London.
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