Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), one of the most notable of the early women photographers, was deeply embedded in the visual and literary culture of her day. Although her career lasted just eleven years, between 1864 and 1875, she established herself as a prolific and ambitious artist. Her close friends numbered poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, astronomer Sir John Herschel, and painter George Frederick Watts; and many of the major figures of her day posed for her, including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Born in India, she married Charles Hay Cameron, a lawyer and Bengal civil servant, in 1838, and the couple became social leaders in Calcutta. With her husband’s retirement in 1848, they left India for England, and through the salon hosted by her sister and brother-in-law, Sarah and Thoby Prinsep at Little Holland House in the Kensington neighborhood of London, met writers, politicians, and artists. Cameron responded deeply to the people she met there. In 1860, the Camerons moved to Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, fashionable since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built Osborne House. The Camerons purchased a house next door to the Tennysons.
Cameron’s daughter gave her mother a camera in December 1863, and she made her first successful photograph in January 1864. Thereafter she was active exhibiting her work and putting together albums to present to her wide circle of friends. She enthusiastically embraced the medium: “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.”1 With her fascination with people, it is not surprising that portraiture was her specialty. Her literary tastes paralleled those of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, favoring Arthurian legends and Shakespeare, and, inspired by what she read, Cameron set up elaborate costumed tableaux to photograph, which included religious subjects. Responding to contemporary writers, she produced illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King which were published in 1875. A formidable woman, she persuaded family and friends to pose for her.
Cameron favored the wet-plate collodion process, although working with the glass negatives, which she printed on albumen paper, was messy and involved toxic chemicals. Her family was indulgent regarding her new enthusiasm that had taken over their lives, as one of her subjects recollected of Aunt Julia’s appearance: “Dressed in dark clothes, stained with chemicals (and smelling of them too), with a plump eager face and piercing eyes, and a voice husky and a little harsh, yet in some way compelling and even charming.” The writer noted: “We were at once pressed into the service of the camera.”2
Cameron made beautiful portraits of women, many of them individuals who were also accomplished and intelligent. But most of the women who posed for her (who included her housemaids) were not as famous as the men who came to her studio. Marie Spartali (1843–1927) was one of the few to have established a professional reputation in her own right. Between 1868 and 1870, Cameron made twenty-one portraits of Spartali, a notable Pre-Raphaelite painter whose subjects paralleled Cameron’s. British by birth, and the daughter of a wealthy businessman merchant who served as the Greek consul in London, her family were prominent members of the city’s Anglo-Greek community. She had studied with Ford Madox Brown between 1864 and 1870, and her friends included William and Jane Morris. Her beauty made her popular as a model, and she posed for Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as for Cameron. Marie Spartali’s younger sister Christina (1845–1884), who was the model for James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1864–5, Freer Gallery), was the subject of three portraits by Cameron in March 1868.3
Several of Cameron’s images of Spartali were inspired by literary and mythological subjects, as in Hypatia (1868), The Imperial Eleanore (1868), and Mnemsoyne (or Memory, 1868). Rossetti had found Spartali difficult to capture, as he wrote in 1869: “I find her head the most difficult I ever drew. It depends not nearly so much on real form, as on a subtle charm of life which one cannot re-create. I think it would be hardly possible to make a completely successful picture of her.”4
Cameron’s portrait of Marie Spartali was done the year before she married American journalist William James Stillman (1828–1901) in 1871. A widower, he had trained as an artist, and was also a talented photographer, and had a varied career as a foreign correspondent for The Times, the American consul to Greece, and ambassador to Rome and Crete. He and Marie resided for many years in Rome and Florence.
Posing for a Cameron portrait could take from five to seven minutes, and most of her subjects found it difficult to sit still that long. But if they moved, she did not regard that as a problem, and her deliberate choice to keep her images somewhat out of focus became a trademark of Cameron’s work (something for which she was criticized). If her early blurry images were an accident (the collodion process could produce images of great clarity), she found them beautiful, writing to astronomer Sir John Herschel in December 1864: “What is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?”5 A 1866 review published in MacMillan’s Magazine in London observed: “Mrs. Cameron was the first person who had the wit to see that her mistakes were her success, and henceforward to make her portraits systematically out of focus.”6
In October 1875, the Camerons left Freshwater for Ceylon where they had coffee plantations, and where several of their sons lived. She died early in 1879 at the age of sixty-five and her husband the next year at the age of eighty-five.
Betsy Fahlman
Julia Margaret Cameron, Marie Spartali, c.1870, albumen print, 33 x 25.4 cm, SOLARI 94.032.001L