Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron (''née'' Pattle; 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and women, for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature, and for sensitive portraits of men, women and children.

After establishing herself first among Calcutta's Anglo-Indian upper-class and then among London's cultural elite, Cameron formed her own salon frequented by distinguished Victorians at the seaside village of Freshwater, Isle of Wight.

After showing a keen interest in photography for many years, Cameron took up the practice at the relatively late age of 48, after her daughter gave her a camera as a present. She quickly produced a large body of work capturing the genius, beauty, and innocence of the men, women, and children who visited her studio at Freshwater, and created unique allegorical images inspired by tableaux vivants, theatre, 15th-century Italian painters, and the work of her creative contemporaries. Her photography career was short but productive; she made around 900 photographs over a 12-year period.

Cameron's work was contentious in her own time. Critics derided her softly focused and unrefined images, and considered her illustrative photographs amateurish and hammy. However, her portraits of respected men (such as Henry Taylor, Charles Darwin, and Sir John Herschel) have been consistently praised, both in her own life and in reviews of her work since. Her images have been described as "extraordinarily powerful" and "wholly original", and she has been credited with producing the first close-ups in the history of the medium.

Biography

Early life and education

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

James Pattle was a successful official from England who worked in India for the East India Company. His family had been involved with the East India Company for many years, though he traced his line to a 17th-century ancestor living in Chancery Lane, London. Her 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. When he died he was shipped back to London in a barrel of rum for burial in Camberwell.

Julia was the fourth of her parents' children. Three of her parents' children died in infancy. Julia and the six of her six sisters who survived into adulthood had inherited 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 demure Victorian attire of other colonial woman.

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

Julia's sisters all made advantageous matches, Adeline marrying a military man who became a General, Sophia marrying a baronet, Louisa, a High Court Judge while Maria married the distinguished Dr John Jackson, with among their descendants being Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Sara married Henry Prinsep an administrator with the East India Company, and made their home at Little Holland House in Kensington, England an important intellectual centre. Among their children was Julia's godchild Julia Stephen. Virginia Pattle married Lord Charles Eastnor, later the third Earl Somers. Their eldest daughter was Lady Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks, the temperance leader, while the younger, Lady Adeline Marie became the Duchess of Bedford.

Marriage and social life

South Africa and Calcutta

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 after an illness.

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. Charles Hay was also there to convalesce, likely from a virulent malarial fever which often spread during the Indian monsoon season. The illness he suffered caused recurring 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 of that same year, Julia gave birth to their first child; Sir John 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 about the latest developments in photographic technology. In 1839, Herschel informed Cameron about the invention of photography. In 1842, he sent her two dozen calotypes and daguerreotypes, the first photographs she ever saw.

England

Perhaps to be closer to their two children, the Camerons retired to England in 1845, where they took part in London's artistic and cultural scene. Julia often visited Little Holland House in Kensington, London, 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 well-known 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 creative personalities after a later visit to the same salon-like atmosphere at Freshwater, "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 fully and invested in coffee and rubber plantations in Ceylon, becoming one of the island's largest landowners. The Camerons settled down in England, first in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, where they were neighbours of Taylor, then to East Sheen in 1850. During this time, Cameron became a member of a society for art education and appreciation and 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 Alfred Tennyson at the seaside village of Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, Cameron hastily purchased a property next door to Tennyson. 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 well-known personalities with music, poetry readings, and amateur plays, creating an artistic scene much as what was previously found at Little Holland House. She lived there until 1875.

Photography career

Early 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 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. Of the gift, her daughter stated "It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater."

After receiving the camera, she cleared out a chicken coop and converted it into studio space. Later, in an unfinished autobiographical manuscript titled ''Annals of my Glasshouse'', Cameron 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 she 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, and was elected to the Photographic Society of London, of which she remained a member until her death and where she displayed work at yearly exhibitions.

Though Cameron took up photography as an amateur and considered herself an artist, and despite never making commissioned portraits nor establishing a commercial studio, she thought of her photographic activity as a professional endeavour, actively copyrighting, publishing, and marketing her work. Her family did not see substantial profits from their coffee plantations in Ceylon 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.

Mid-career

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, the museum offered her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, essentially 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 tableauxs 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'', an unfinished memoir recounting her photographic career.

Later life

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 were managing the family coffee plantations (which had been badly harmed by a fungus), 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 the absence at their vacated 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 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. The botanical painter and biologist Marianne North recounted her time visiting 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 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.

Photographic work

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 human physiognomy 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

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