Julia Margaret Cameron

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At the age of 48, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) received a camera from her daughter and son in-law as a birthday gift. Little did she and her family suspect that it would mark the beginning of a celebrated artistic career. Quick to gain mastery of the nascent art of photography, Cameron developed into one of its most noteworthy pioneers and innovators. With her hallmark soft-focus lens and dramatic lighting effects, she remains known for her unique portraits of famous men and her romantic, allegorical images of women.

Cameron was born on June 11, 1815 in Calcutta, India. She was the second of seven daughters born to affluent parents who raised their children in India. Her father, James Pattle, was an Englishman who held posts with the financial and judicial departments of the Bengal Civil Service. Her mother, Adeline Pattle (nee de l'Etang), who was of French descent. Cameron was distinguished among her sisters by her boundless generosity, her ardent enthusiasms, and later, by her artistic talents.

High-Society Grand Dame

Before she possessed a camera, Cameron channeled her passions into the rich family life and social responsibilities that she shared with her sisters, and subsequently into those that she shared with Charles Hay Cameron, the man who became her husband in 1838. A jurist who held a place as the fourth Member of Council at Calcutta, and a philosopher who had written a treatise on the sublime and the beautiful, Charles was a prominent figure in British-colonized India. For ten years the Camerons lived and raised a family in Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka), where Charles took on the task of codifying the Indian legal system. A man of considerable means, he also purchased several coffee plantations. Among Europeans living in India, the couple occupied a position near the very top of the social hierarchy, and Cameron gracefully grew into her role as a high-society grand dame. She was known for her love of bestowing lavish gifts upon her friends, as well as for her ardent, prolific letter-writing.

Cameron was by no means idle during the 48 years that preceded her foray into photography. Before marrying, she had traveled to France to be educated. While her education was not of the formal kind that was available to men of her day, it left her well acquainted with the world of arts and letters. Her first love was literature. In addition to translating works from German, she wrote some poetry and fiction of her own. She gave birth to six children, five sons and one daughter, expanding what was already a large extended family. In 1848, her husband retired and the family relocated to England. They took up residence first in London and later on the Isle of Wight. Among their friends were the poet Alfred Tennyson and the painter G. F. Watts. In later years, the writer Virginia Woolf would claim Cameron as her great-aunt.

"Gifted" with a Camera

Before the fateful birthday on which her daughter and son-in-law presented her with a camera, Cameron had been keeping abreast of the new art of photography through her friend, Sir John Herschel. An astronomer by training, who also pursued an interest in photography, Herschel had begun to send Cameron examples of early Talbotype images by 1841. Yet it was without first-hand experience that she tried her hand at photography in 1863. "I began with no knowledge of the art," she reminisced in Annals of My Glass House, a brief memoir that she wrote in 1874. "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." Nevertheless, she took to the new art zealously, rounding up family, friends, gardeners, maids, and even passersby to sit perfectly still before her lens. By the time a year had passed, Cameron had compiled albums for the enjoyment of loved ones and had become an elected member of the Photographic Society in London.

In 1860, the Camerons had purchased property with two adjacent cottages near Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, not far from the residence of Tennyson and his wife. A central tower was built to link together the two cottages, and the Camerons dubbed the structure Dimboula Lodge after their family estates in Sri Lanka. It was on this property that Cameron did some of her most important work as a photographer. Converting the coal shed into a darkroom and the hen house into a studio, Cameron pursued her art with obsessive energy. The Isle was a favorite destination for the artists and thinkers of Victorian England. The presence of Tennyson, who was then England's poet laureate, was magnetic. Many eminent people of the day, including author and photographer Lewis Carroll and pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, visited him at his Farringford House estate. Those who frequented the area became part of what was known as the Freshwater Circle, a group of artists, writers, and intellectuals, with Tennyson at its center.

Cameron is often credited for her instrumental role in gathering together the members of this illustrious group. All of them received invitations to visit Dimboula, where they were coaxed into Cameron's glass-walled studio to have their portraits taken. It is for these unique, historically relevant photographs that Cameron is perhaps most well known. The poets Henry W. Longfellow and Robert Browning, the essayist Thomas Carlyle, and the naturalist Charles Darwin were among her most distinguished sitters. To these photographs, Cameron brought all of her characteristic techniques. She used daylight to great effect, bathing her subjects in a glow that intensified during a long exposure time. She preferred a soft-focus lens because it allowed her to achieve a painterly result.

Cameron enjoyed photographing beautiful women, whom she often had dressed in costumes and portrayed as allegorical or historical figures. The majority of her work consists of such portraits and vignettes using women as subjects. May Hillier, the parlor maid that Cameron was said to have chosen for her beauty, posed as the Greek poet Sappho and as the Madonna with Child (the infant that Hillier held was probably a grandchild of Cameron's). Julia Jackson, the mother of Virginia Woolf and Cameron's niece, and May Prinsep, another relative, posed for the camera time and again; the latter Cameron often portrayed as poetic heroines such as Christabel and Beatrice.

On occasion Cameron would create photographic "illustrations" of contemporary poetry by such figures as Charles Kingsley and her beloved Tennyson. These portraits usually required a cast of characters, and to fill these roles she would enlist family, friends, household servants, and guests. For Tennyson's epic "Idylls of the King," Cameron planned to create a series of vignettes representing dramatic moments in the poem. Costumes were sewn and fitted to sitters, and sets were assembled. Like amateur theater productions, these works were not always successful, especially when Cameron's husband, dressed in a hooded robe with his white beard flowing, could not help laughing during the shoot. Yet the results pleased Tennyson and, when the second volume of "Idylls" was published in 1875, Cameron's photographs accompanied the verses. "It is immortality for me to be bound up with you, Alfred," wrote Cameron in one of her many letters to the poet.

Returned to Ceylon

The coffee plantations that Charles had purchased years ago in Ceylon were floundering. The couple's style of living at Freshwater, where guests were always treated extravagantly, was a constant drain to finances. Thus it was decided that, in their weakened financial state, the Camerons would leave Freshwater and return to Ceylon. Charles had been pining for the warm climate and the Eastern landscape that he so loved, and two of the couple's sons had taken up residence in their former homeland. Announcing to surprised friends that they would be setting off to join their sons, the Camerons arranged to leave by boat from Southampton. Among their transported belongings were two coffins (purchased in the event that they would be hard to find in the East), in which the china and glassware were packed. Clearly, there was an air of finality to the journey.

Once she and Charles had settled in the fishing village of Kalutara, Cameron took to her photography again. "The walls were covered with magnificent pictures which tumbled over the tables and chairs and mixed in picturesque confusion with books and draperies," describes Virginia Woolf in the introduction to a 1926 book of photographs by Cameron. But the height of her career, which was linked so strongly to her sense of place and of community at Freshwater, was coming to an end. Her most enduring photographs would be those taken in the former setting, where she had felt so much at home. Cameron was able to relish a fame that she had left behind in England. Exhibitions of her work appeared in London and Bournemouth. The demand for her photographs was so high that the Autotype Company had reissued 70 of her prints in red, brown, and black editions.

When Cameron died on January 26, 1879, in Kalutara, Ceylon, it was with a sense of deep fulfillment and pride. "It is a sacred blessing which has attended my photography," she wrote to Tennyson's wife in one of her last letters. "It gives a pleasure to millions and a deeper happiness to very many." For several years after her death, those pleasures abated, and Cameron's work nearly fell into obscurity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his followers, known as the "Photo Secessionists," rediscovered and championed her work. This new generation of photographers admired the psychological intensity of her portraits. In her other works they drew parallels to the British pre-Raphaelite painters with whom she had cavorted at Freshwater.

Cameron's work continues to intrigue students of photography and of Victorian England. A traveling exhibition of her work entitled "Julia Margaret Cameron's Women" opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall of 1998, then filled the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art during the following year. Her words of 1874, printed in the memoir Annals of My Glass House, best explain what motivated Cameron to create this rich artistic legacy: "I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied."

Further Reading

Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, by Julia Margaret Cameron, edited by Tristam Powell, Hogarth Press, 1973.

Wolf, Sylvia. Julia Margaret Cameron's Women. Yale University Press, 1998.

"Julia Margaret Cameron," from The Julia Margaret Cameron Trust, http://www.iwightc.ac.uk/local/cameron/jmc.htm (October 20, 1999).

"Julia Margaret Cameron: Victorian Photographer," http://www.mfa.org/exhibits/cameron.html (October 20, 1999).

"Masters of Photography: Julia Margaret Cameron," http://masters-of-photography.com/C/cameron/cameron_mountain_nymph.html (October 20, 1999).

Cameron, Julia Margaret (1815-79), British portrait and genre photographer. She was born in Calcutta, where at the age of 23 she married Charles Cameron, a senior British administrator, twenty years her senior. In 1845, the couple returned to England with their children, and became involved in London's artistic and cultural life.

In 1860 the family moved to Freshwater, Isle of Wight, where their neighbour was Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate. Cameron had already shown some interest in photography (there is evidence that she experimented with taking and printing pictures in the early 1860s). In late 1863 her daughter and son-in-law gave her a camera, hoping it would occupy her while her husband was in Ceylon, where he owned coffee plantations. Making a studio and darkroom from some outbuildings, she took—on 29 January 1864—the portrait of a 9-year-old girl, Annie Philpot, which she dubbed ‘My first success’. Cameron instantly began to take compelling portraits (many, especially those of intellectual and artistic men of the day, in extreme close-up), as well as illustrations of biblical scenes and literature. Among her famous male sitters were Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Sir John Herschel, Henry Longfellow, Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, and G. F. Watts. Using at first a 28 × 23 cm (11 × 9 in) and, later, a 38 × 30.5 cm (15 × 12 in) camera, she made almost life-sized images of these famous heads, usually against a totally dark background, their bodies draped in dark cloth. Carefully controlled lighting from one side made the results still more powerful and revealing.

Cameron's photographs of women are less dramatic. Though she photographed some female celebrities—Marianne North and Marie Spartali (painters), Thackeray's daughter Anne (herself a successful author), and the poet Christina Rossetti—most of her female models were family and friends, selected for their Pre-Raphaelite beauty. Two of her favourites were maids—Mary Hillier (frequently seen as the Madonna) and Mary Ryan, an Irish beggar girl whom Cameron had employed at least partly, it seems, because of her beauty; both began posing as teenagers. With them and other female models, Cameron pulled her camera back from its extreme close-up position, uncovered the windows in her studio, or went outdoors to create softer and prettier studies.

Though Cameron made illustrations of literary, classical, and biblical stories throughout her career, this element of her work came to a peak in the 1870s, when she created, at Tennyson's suggestion, a series of illustrations for his Idylls of the King. These were published, probably largely at Cameron's expense, in two large-format volumes, in 1874 and 1875. Soon after, she and her husband left England for Ceylon. Though she took some photographs there, her career was almost over. Her dying word was ‘Beauty’.

— Colin Ford

Bibliography

• Cox, J., and Ford, C., Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (2003).
• Ford, C., Julia Margaret Cameron, 19th-Century Photographer of Genius (2003).
• Olsen, V., From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron & Victorian Photography (2003)

Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron (self portrait)
Birth name	Julia Margaret Pattle
Born	11 June 1815(1815-06-11) Calcutta, India
Died	26 January 1879 (aged 63) Kalutara, Ceylon
Nationality	British
Field	Photography

Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for Arthurian and similar legendary themed pictures.

Cameron's photographic career was short, spanning the last eleven years of her life. She did not take up photography until the age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present.^[1] Her work had a huge impact on the development of modern photography, especially her closely cropped portraits which are still mimicked today. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight can still be visited.

Contents 1 Early life 1.1 Marriage 2 Photography 2.1 Portraits 2.2 Photographic illustrations 3 Later life 4 Legacy 5 Further reading 6 References 7 External links

Early life

Julia Margaret Cameron was born Julia Margaret Pattle in Calcutta, India, to James Pattle, a British official of the East India Company, and Adeline de l'Etang,^[2] a daughter of French aristocrats. Julia was from a family of celebrated beauties, and was considered an ugly duckling among her sisters. As her great-niece Virginia Woolf wrote in the 1926 introduction to the Hogarth Press collection of Cameron's photographs, "In the trio [of sisters] where...[one] was Beauty; and [one] Dash; Mrs. Cameron was undoubtedly Talent".^[3]

An 1864 photo by Julia Margaret Cameron of her husband, Charles Hay Cameron (1795-1881).

Marriage

Julia was educated in France, but returned to India, and in 1838 married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law Commission stationed in Calcutta, who was twenty years her senior. In 1848, Charles Hay Cameron retired, and the family moved to London, England. Cameron's sister, Sarah Prinsep, had been living in London and hosted a salon at Little Holland House, the dower house of Holland House in Kensington, where famous artists and writers regularly visited. In 1860, Cameron visited the estate of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Wight. Julia was taken with the location, and the Cameron family purchased a property on the island soon after. They called it Dimbola Lodge after the family's Ceylon estate.

Photography

"Annie, my first success", 29 January 1864. One of Cameron's earliest photos.

In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied."^[4]

The basic techniques of soft-focus "fancy portraits", which she later developed were taught to her by David Wilkie Wynfield. She later wrote that "to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success".^[5]

Alfred Lord Tennyson, her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, often brought friends to see the photographer.

Cameron was sometimes obsessive about her new occupation, with subjects sitting for countless exposures in the blinding light as she laboriously coated, exposed, and processed each wet plate. The results were, in fact, unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. This led some of her contemporaries to complain and even ridicule the work, but her friends and family were supportive, and she was one of the most prolific and advanced of amateurs in her time. Her enthusiasm for her craft meant that her children and others sometimes tired of her endless photographing, but it also means that we are left with some of the best of records of her children and of the many notable figures of the time who visited her.

During her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron's portraits are significant is because they are often the only existing photograph of historical figures. Many paintings and drawings exist, but, at the time, photography was still a new and challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio.

The bulk of Cameron's photographs fit into two categories – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works. In the allegorical works in particular, her artistic influence was clearly Pre-Raphaelite, with far-away looks and limp poses and soft lighting.^{[citation needed]}

Portraits

Ellen Terry photographed in 1864 by Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron's sister ran the artistic scene at Little Holland House, which gave her many famous subjects for her portraits. Some of her famous subjects include: Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry and George Frederic Watts. Most of these distinctive portraits are cropped closely around the subject's face and are in soft focus. Cameron was often friends with these Victorian celebrities, and tried to capture their personalities in her photos. Among Cameron's lesser-known images are those she took of Mary Emily ('May') Prinsep, wife of Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, the elder son of Alfred Tennyson and a British colonial administrator. Cameron's portraits of May Prinsep, taken on the Isle of Wight, show a somewhat plain woman shot head-on and without affect.^[6]

Photographic illustrations

Cameron's posed photographic illustrations represent the other half of her work. In these illustrations, she frequently photographed historical scenes or literary works, which often took the quality of oil paintings. However, she made no attempt in hiding the backgrounds. Cameron's friendship with Tennyson led to his asking her to photograph illustrations for his Idylls of the King. These photographs are designed to look like oil paintings from the same time period, including rich details like historical costumes and intricate draperies. Today, these posed works are sometimes dismissed by art critics. Nevertheless, Cameron saw these photographs as art, just like the oil paintings they imitated.

Julia Margaret Cameron in 1870, as photographed by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron.

Later life

In 1875, the Camerons moved back to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Julia continued to practice photography but complained in letters about the difficulties of getting chemicals and pure water to develop and print photographs. Also, in India, she did not have access to Little Holland House's artistic community. She also did not have a market to distribute her photographs as she had in England. Because of this, Cameron took fewer pictures in India. These pictures were of posed Indian natives, paralleling the posed pictures that Cameron had taken of neighbours in England. Almost none of Cameron's work from India survives. Cameron caught a bad chill and died in Kalutara, Ceylon in 1879.

Legacy

Cameron portrait of Julia Jackson, Cameron's niece, favourite subject, and mother of the author Virginia Woolf.

Cameron's niece Julia Prinsep Stephen née Jackson (1846–1895) wrote the biography of Cameron, which appeared in the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, 1886.^[7]

Julia Stephen was the mother of Virginia Woolf, who wrote a comic portrayal of the "Freshwater circle" in her only play Freshwater. Woolf edited, with Roger Fry, a collection of Cameron's photographs.^[8]

However, it was not until 1948 that her photography became more widely known when Helmut Gernsheim wrote a book on her work.^[9]

Further reading

• Cameron, J. M. P. (1875). Illustrations by Julia Margaret Cameron of Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King and other poems.
• Cameron, J. M. P. (1889). Unfinished autobiography "Annals of my glass house" by Julia Margaret Cameron, written 1874, first published 1889.
• Cameron, J. M. P. (1973). Victorian photographs of famous men & fair women. Boston: D.R. Godine.
• Cameron, J. M. (1975). The Herschel album: an album of photographs. London (2 St Martin's Place, WC2H 0HE): National Portrait Gallery.
• Cameron, J. M., & Ford, C. (1975). The Cameron Collection: an album of photographs. Wokingham: Van Nostrand Reinhold for the National Portrait Gallery.
• Cameron, J. M. P., & Weaver, M. (1986). Whisper of the muse: the Overstone album & other photographs. Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum.
• Cameron, J. M. P. (1994). For my best beloved sister, Mia: an album of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron : an exhibition of works from the Hochberg-Mattis collection organized by the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Albuquerque: The Museum.
• Wolf, Sylvia, et al. (1998). Julia Margaret Cameron's women. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago.
• Lukitsh, Joanne (2001). Julia Margaret Cameron. London: Phaidon.
• Cox, Julian, and Colin Ford (2003). Julia Margaret Cameron: the complete photographs. Los Angeles: Getty Publications.

Henry Thoby Prinsep of London. Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1866

References

1. ^ J. Paul Getty Museum. Julia Margaret Cameron. Retrieved September 13, 2008.
2. ^ Adeline de l'Etang was the daughter of Chevalier Antoine de l'Etang, who had been a page and probable lover of Marie Antoinette and an officer in the Garde du Corps of King Louis XVI. He had married the Indian-born Therese Blin de Grincourt.[1]
3. ^ Setina, Emily. A Camera of Her Own: Woolf and the Legacy of the Indomitable Mrs. Cameron. Literature Compass 4/1(2007):263–270.
4. ^ AskOxford: The Cod and the Camera Quote is taken from her unpublished autobiography, "Annals of My Glass House."
5. ^ Victoria and Albert Museum: Julia Margaret Cameron Related Photographers
6. ^ 'Christabel,' Mary Emily 'May' Prinsep, Julia Margaret Cameron, albumen print on gold-edged cabinet, 1866, sitter in 7 portraits, National Portrait Gallery, npg.org.uk
7. ^ Stephen, L. (1886). Dictionary of national biography: vol. VIII. Burton -- Cantwell. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.
8. ^ Woolf, V., & Fry, R. E. (1926). Victorian photographs of famous men & women. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
9. ^ Gernsheim, H. (1948). Julia Margaret Cameron; her life and photographic work. Famous photographers. London: Fountain Press; distributed in the USA by Transatlantic Arts, New York.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Julia Margaret Cameron

• Julia Margaret Cameron Trust
• The official National Media Museum print website containing many Julia Margaret Cameron prints
• George Eastman House photography collection - 163 selected images
• Julia Margaret Cameron exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
• Inventory of the Julia Margaret Cameron Family Papers, ca. 1777-1940, including full names of individuals, their identity, and nicknames used within the correspondence
• "Julia Margaret Cameron - Photographer in Focus". Photography. Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photography/photo_focus/cameron/index.html. Retrieved 2007-08-25. 
• Julia Margaret Cameron photography as part of 'Victorian Visions' (on loan from V&A Museum) at Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Wirral. From December 2007 - March 2008.

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