Julia Margaret Cameron

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Early life and education

Julia Margaret Cameron was born Julia Margaret Pattle on 11 June 1815, at Garden Reach in Calcutta, India, to Adeline Marie and James Peter Pattle.

James Pattle worked in India for the East India Company. His family had been involved with the Company for many years. He traced his line to a 17th-century ancestor living in Chancery Lane, London. Adeline's mother was a French aristocrat and the daughter of Chevalier Ambrose Pierre Antoine de l'Etang, who had been a page to Marie Antoinette and an officer in the Garde du Corps of King Louis XVI. After James died in Calcutta, he was shipped back to London in a barrel of rum for burial in Camberwell.

Julia was the fourth of ten children, three of whom died in infancy. Julia and six of her sisters survived into adulthood, inheriting some Bengali blood through their maternal grandmother, Thérèse Josephe Blin de Grincourt. The seven sisters were known for their "charm, wit and beauty" and for being close, outspoken, and unconventional in behaviour and dress. They favoured Indian silks and shawls rather than the Victorian attire of other colonial women.

The sisters were sent to France as children to be educated, Julia living there with her maternal grandmother in Versailles from 1818 to 1834, after which she returned to India.

Julia's sisters all made advantageous matches. Older sister Adeline married Lt-General Colin Mackenzie. Sophia married Sir John Warrander Dalrymple. Louisa married Henry Vincent Bayley, a high court judge. Maria married Dr John Jackson, and among their children was Julia's godchild Julia Stephen. Sara (Sarah) married Sir Henry Thoby Prinsep, a director of the East India Company, and made their home at Little Holland House in Kensington, which became an important intellectual centre. Virginia Pattle married Charles Somers-Cocks, Viscount Eastnor (later 3rd Earl Somers). Their eldest daughter was Lady Henry Somerset, the temperance leader, while the younger, Lady Adeline Marie, became the Duchess of Bedford.

In 1835, after suffering several illnesses, Julia visited the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa with her parents to recover. It was common for Europeans living in India to visit South Africa to convalesce. While there, she met the British astronomer and photochemist Sir John Herschel, who was observing the southern celestial hemisphere.

She also met Charles Hay Cameron, twenty years her senior and a reformer of Indian law and education who later invested in coffee plantations in what is now Sri Lanka. He was also there to convalesce, probably after a malarial fever, which often spread during the Indian monsoon season. The illness caused kidney trouble and diarrhœa for the rest of his life.

They were married in Calcutta on 1 February 1838, two years after meeting. In December, Julia gave birth to their first child; Herschel was the godfather. 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 whom 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.

Through the early 1840s—as the organiser of social engagements for the Governor-General, Lord Hardinge—Cameron became a prominent hostess in Anglo-Indian society. During this time she also corresponded with Herschel. In 1839, he told Cameron about the invention of photography. In 1842, he sent her two dozen calotypes and daguerreotypes, the first photographs she ever saw.

The Camerons moved to England in 1845, where they took part in London's artistic and cultural scene. Julia often visited Little Holland House where her sister, Sara Prinsep, oversaw a literary and artistic salon "of Pre-Raphaelite painters, poets, and aristocrats with artistic pretensions". Here, she met many of the subjects of her later portraits, including Henry Taylor and Alfred Tennyson.

Daphne du Maurier describes the scene:The nobilitee, the gentree, the litherathure, polithics and art of the counthree, by jasus! It's a nest of proraphaelites, where Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Watts, Leighton etc, Tennyson, the Brownings and Thackeray etc and tutti quanti receive dinners and incense, and cups of tea handed to them by these women almost kneeling.Benjamin Jowett echoed this when describing Cameron's reverence to these artists and poets after a later visit to Freshwater. The same salon-like atmosphere was present. "She is a sort of hero-worshipper, and the hero is not Mr Tennyson – he only occupies second place – but Henry Taylor."

In 1847, she was writing poetry, had started a novel, and published a translation of Gottfried August Bürger's Leonora.

In 1848, Charles Cameron retired and invested in coffee and rubber plantations in Ceylon, becoming one of the island's largest landowners. The Camerons settled in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, where they were neighbours of Taylor, then moved to East Sheen in 1850. During this time, Cameron became a member of a society for art education and appreciation. George Frederic Watts started working on a painting of Cameron (which is now in the National Portrait Gallery).

In 1860, after an extended visit to Tennyson at Freshwater, Cameron bought a house next door. The family moved there, naming the property "Dimbola" after one of the coffee plantations in Ceylon. A private gate connected the residences and the two families soon started entertaining famous people with music, poetry readings, and amateur plays, creating an artistic scene similar to Little Holland House. Cameron lived there until 1875.

Photography career

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 son-in-law gave her a sliding-box camera for Christmas. The gift was meant to provide a diversion while her husband was in Ceylon. Her daughter said, "It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater."

Cameron converted a chicken coop into studio space. Later, in an unfinished autobiography, Annals of my Glasshouse, she wrote:I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl house I had given my children became my glass house. The hens were liberated, I hope and believe not eaten. The profit of my boys upon new laid eggs was stopped, and all hands and hearts sympathised in my new labour, since the society of hens and chickens was soon changed for that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalized the humble little farm erection. [...] 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.On 29 January 1864 Cameron photographed nine‐year‐old Annie Philpot, an image she described as her "first success". She sent the photograph to the subject's father with the note:My first perfect success in the complete Photograph owing greatly to the docility & sweetness of my best & fairest sitter. This Photograph was taken by me at 1 p.m. Friday Jan. 29th. Printed—Toned—fixed and framed all by me & given as it is now by 8 p.m. this same day.That same year, she compiled albums of her images for Watts and Herschel, registered her work and prepared it for exhibition and sale. She was elected to the Photographic Society of London, displaying work at yearly exhibitions and remaining a member until her death.

Cameron took up photography as an amateur and considered herself an artist. Although never making commissioned portraits or establishing a commercial studio, she thought of her photographic activity as a professional endeavour, copyrighting, publishing, and marketing her work. The family did not see substantial profits from their coffee plantations and Cameron may have been looking to bring in some money with her photography. The portraits of celebrities and the high volume of her photographic output also suggest commercial aspirations.

In 1865, she 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.

Her photographic activity was supported by her husband. Cameron wrote: "My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause."

In August 1865, the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), purchased 80 of her photographs. Three years later, it offered her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, making her the museum's first artist-in-residence.

She produced 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 created The Kiss of Peace, which she considered her finest work.

In the early 1870s, Cameron's work matured. Her elaborate illustrative tableaux involving religious, literary, and classical figures peaked in a series of images for Tennyson's Idylls of the King, published in 1874 and 1875, evidently at her expense. During this time, she also wrote Annals of my Glass House.

Later life

In October 1873, her daughter died in childbirth. Two years later, because of her husband's ill-health, the lower cost of living, and to be near to their sons who were managing the family coffee plantations, Cameron 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".

Henry Taylor recounts the departure:Mr. and Mrs. Cameron have taken their departure for Ceylon, there to live and die. He had bought an estate there some thirty years ago when he was serving the Crown there and elsewhere in the East, and he had a passionate love for the island, to which he had rendered an important service in providing it with a code of procedure ... he never ceased to yearn after the island as his place of abode, and thither in his eighty-first year he has betaken himself, with a strange joy. The design was kept secret, – I believe even from their dearest relatives.V.C. Scott O'Connor later wrote about their empty home in Freshwater:The house is silent now and tenantless. All its old feverish life and bustle are stilled as is the heart which beat here in true sympathy with every living creature that came within its reach needing such succor. Her pretty maids, her scholars, her poets, her philosophers, astronomers, and divines, all those men of genius who came and sat willingly to her while in a fever of artistic emotion she plied the instruments of her art, – they have all gone, and silence is the only tenant left at Dimbola.The move 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 heat and a lack of fresh water for washing prints. The botanical painter and biologist Marianne North recounted a visit to Cameron in Ceylon:The walls of the room were covered with magnificent photographs; others were tumbling about the tables, chairs, and floors with quantities of damp books, all untidy and picturesque; the lady herself with a lace veil on her head and flowing draperies. Her oddities were most refreshing . . . She also made some studies of natives while I was there, and took such a fancy to the back of one of them (which she said was absolutely superb) that she insisted on her son retaining him as her gardener, though she had no garden and he did not know even the meaning of the word. In 1875, after a short visit to England, Cameron fell ill with a dangerous chill.

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.

Cameron 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 about 900 photographs.

Influences

Cameron was an educated and cultured woman; she was a Christian thinker familiar with medieval art, the Renaissance, and the Pre-Raphaelites. She may also have been influenced by the contemporary interest in phrenology, the study of the skull as a sign of a person's character. The Old Masters also informed her work. Her compositions and use of light have been connected to Raphael, Rembrandt, and Titian.

John Herschel, who relayed to Cameron the news of the inventions of photography by Talbot and Daguerre, was an important influence on technique and the practicalities of the medium, as indicated in a letter Cameron wrote to the astronomer, "You were my first teacher and to you I owe all the first experience and insights."

It is likely that Cameron saw Reginald Southey photographing on the Isle of Wight during a holiday in 1857 when he visited the Camerons and photographed their children and the children of her neighbours, the Tennysons, before Cameron took up the camera in earnest.

Perhaps the most important photographer to influence Cameron's work was David Wilkie Wynfield. Much like Cameron, Wynfield published soft-focus portraits of friends dressed up as characters from history or literature. The press compared their photographic work and noted the similarities in style and their consideration of the medium as fine art. Cameron's style of close-up portraits resembling Titian may well have been learned from Wynfield, since she took a lesson from him and later wrote "I consult him in correspondence whenever I am in difficulty". The Arts Council booklet to accompany the 1951 Festival of Britain photography exhibition quoted from an 11-page "holograph letter" (exhibit 471) to William Michael Rossetti in which she states: "To [Wynfield's] beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success."

Cameron's portraits are partly the product of her intimacy and regard for the subject, but also intend to capture "particular qualities or essences—typically, genius in men and beauty in women". Mike Weaver, a scholar who wrote about Cameron's photography in work published in 1984, framed her idea of genius and beauty "within a specifically Christian framework, as indicative of the sublime and the sacred". Weaver supposes that Cameron's myriad influences informed her concept of beauty: "the Bible, classical mythology, Shakespeare's plays, and Tennyson's poems were fused into a single vision of ideal beauty."

Cameron herself indicated her desire to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied" and "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty."

Her female subjects were typically chosen for their beauty, particularly the "long-necked, long-haired, immature beauty familiar in Pre-Raphaelite paintings". In Virginia Woolf's farcical play Freshwater, which described the cultural scene at Freshwater, Cameron's character comically expresses her commitment to beauty:I have sought the beautiful in the most unlikely places. I have searched the police force at Freshwater, and not a man have I found with calves worthy of Sir Galahad. But, as I said to the Chief Constable, "Without beauty, constable, what is order? Without life, what is law?" Why should I continue to have my silver protected by a race of men whose legs are aesthetically abhorrent to me? If a burgler came and he were beautiful, I should say to him: Take my fish knives! Take my cruets, my bread baskets and my soup tureens. What you take is nothing to what you give, your calves, your beautiful calves.

Portraits

Cameron's photographs are generally placed into three categories: distinguished portraits of men, delicate portraits of women, and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works.

Cameron's portraits of men were a kind of hero-worship. To Thomas Carlyle, Cameron wrote "When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer."

Most of these men are well-known scientists, writers, or clergymen. Cameron turned to Old Master paintings and the contemporary idea —based in phrenology— of the ideal "type" to capture the greatness that she perceived in these eminent Victorian individuals. Her aspiration to record this greatness resulted in powerful images displaying a masterly command of chiaroscuro that resulted in "the finest and most revealing gallery of eminent Victorians in existence".

Janet Malcom notes the attention Cameron paid to facial hair as an expressive element in her portraits, writing that "Her close-ups of Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Longfellow, Taylor, Watts, and Charles Cameron are as much celebrations of beards as of Victorian eminence."

Her images of women are decidedly softer than those of men. With less dramatic lighting and a more typical distance between the sitter and the camera, these images are less dynamic and more conventional.

Cameron almost exclusively photographed younger women, never making a portrait even of her neighbour and good friend Emily Tennyson. According to a biographer of Darwin, Cameron refused to take a picture of the biologist's wife, saying that "no woman must be photographed between the ages of eighteen and seventy".

Her mature photographs of women are noted for their subtle but suggestive representation of the obscurity and malleability of female identity. Many of her images of young women obscure their individuality and represent their identity as multifaceted and changeable by showing them "in pairs, or reflected in a mirror... frequently expressive of a deep ambiguity and anxiety."

Janet Malcolm again notes Cameron's attention to the hair of her subjects, writing that "Like the little girls whose hair was mussed to rid it of its prim nursery look, the bigger girls were made to undo their buns and chignons so that their hair would poetically stream or flow or twist around their faces".

Children – her own children, those of relatives, and young locals – were often models for Cameron. Children were popular subjects in the Victorian era and Cameron kept with the prevailing notion of them as innocent, kind, and noble. She regularly depicted them as angels or as children from Bible stories.

The children in her images were not always cooperative, and her attempts to cast them as allegorical figures were often frustrated by the child's boredom, indignation, or distraction – moods which are often seen in her images.

21st century reception

Colin Ford, in the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography calls her images "extraordinarily powerful" and "arguably the first 'close-up' photographs in history". He continues:Her visualisations of poetry are different in style and achievement from those of any other photographer of the time. Her contemporaries decorated books of poetry by Burns, Gray, Milton, Scott, Shakespeare and others with picturesque landscapes, occasionally peopling these with attractively disposed figures in the scenery, but rarely illustrating actual characters or incidents from the story.For the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Malcolm Daniel writes:Her artistic goals for photography, informed by the outward appearance and spiritual content of fifteenth-century Italian painting, were wholly original in her medium. She aimed for neither the finish and formalized poses common in the commercial portrait studios, nor for the elaborate narratives of other Victorian "high art" photographers such as H. P. Robinson and O. G. Rejlander.Janet Malcolm, in "The Genius of the Glass House" writes that "Cameron's compositions have more connection to the family album pictures of recalcitrant relatives who have been herded together for the obligatory group picture than they do to the masterpieces of Western painting" but that "The beauty that Cameron found, and in a surprising number of cases was able to arrest, among the aging and aged men of the Victorian literary and art establishment is a cornerstone of her achievement".

In 2003, the J. Paul Getty Museum published a catalogue of Cameron's known surviving photographs. One caption of a portrait of Alice Liddell (whom Cameron photographed as Alethea, Pomona, Ceres, and St. Agnes in 1872) claims that "Cameron's photographic portraits are considered among the finest in the early history of photography".

In 2018, Cameron's Norman Album from 1869 was deemed by the UK government's advisory committee on the export of works of art to be of "outstanding aesthetic importance and significance to the study of the history of photography and, in particular, the work of Julia Margaret Cameron—one of the most significant photographers of the 19th century".

In 2019 Cameron was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.

In 2026, English Heritage unveiled a Blue Plaque in Cameron's honour on 10 Chesham Place, Belgravia, London, where she lived from 1848 in a house designed by Thomas Cubitt.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron

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Article

Biography

Early life and education

Photography career

Later life

Photographic work

Influences

Portraits

Allegories and illustrations

Reception and legacy

Contemporary reception

Early impact

Mid-century rediscovery

21st century reception

Museum and Trust

Retrospective exhibitions

Related journals

About Julia Margaret Cameron

About Julia Margaret Cameron

Article

Related journals

Live room · 1 here

Article

Biography

Early life and education

Marriage and social life

Photography career

Later life

Photographic work

Influences

Portraits

Allegories and illustrations

Reception and legacy

Contemporary reception

Early impact

Mid-century rediscovery

21st century reception

Museum and Trust

Retrospective exhibitions

Related journals