Julia Margaret Cameron
| CHECKLIST | THUMBNAILS | INDEX |
84 albumen prints, an album of 39 images inscribed to G.F. Watts, 25 photographs in two volumes of Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems, and 22 platinum copy prints by Alvin Langdon Coburn.
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta, India on June 11, 1815, the fourth of ten children, seven celebrated daughters of whom survived to adulthood. Well educated and creatively inclined, she embraced the literary and visual arts, merging these so-called sister arts in her zealous avocation of photography as both a spiritually imbued and poetically inspired fine art.
Cameron’s introduction to photography began prior to 1864, the year suggested in her 1874 fragmentary autobiography Annals of My Glass House. As early as 1844, correspondence with lifelong friend, the astronomer Sir John Herschel, laid the foundation of her initial interest in the fledgling medium. In succeeding decades, especially upon her retirement to England in 1848, she surrounded herself with the intelligentsia of the day, including the now obscure poet Sir Henry Taylor, Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, the historian Thomas Carlyle, the painter G. F. Watts, and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Respected Victorian photographers O. G. Rejlander, Lewis Carroll, and David Wynfield also numbered among her acquaintances, with Rejlander assuming a more active role as both photographic companion and collaborator in the early 1860s.
With a career that spanned little more than a decade, Cameron is one of the few figures in the history of photography whose work has always remained popular with historians and public alike. Hers was an indomitable spirit that met the technical challenges of a difficult medium head on, with results that while frequently revealing her idiosyncratic working practices, always illuminate her all consuming passion for her subjects.
Most histories on Cameron have parceled her work into distinct categories: 1) portraits of great men, including notable literary, artistic, and scientific figures; 2) allegorical images of poetic and religious themes; and 3) portraits of beautiful women, including iconic portraits of her niece Julia Jackson, the mother of Virginia Wolff and Vanessa Bell.
The Museum holdings are strong in all three bodies of Cameron’s work, including individual prints from the large-scale folio Idylls of the King. The Museum’s library holds a bound copy of this publication. Also of special note is the 1864 bound presentation album dedicated to G.F. Watts. This album provides a rare opportunity to examine Cameron’s early working habits and subjects, in the narrative album format that she favored to disseminate her work to family and friends.
The Museum’s Gabriel Cromer collection is a primary source of its Cameron holdings.
Subsequent additions were obtained through the acquisition of the A. L. Coburn collection, the Alden Scott Boyer collection, individual donation, and purchase.
T. Mulligan
11/00
| CHECKLIST | THUMBNAILS | INDEX |