259
graphic career from this acquisition of a camera of her
own and wrote on most surviving prints of a portrait of
Annie Philpot taken soon after, ‘My fi rst success.’ She
was immensely proud of the picture and immediately
sent it to Annie’s father (a minor Victorian poet) with a
covering note: ‘My fi rst 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—fi xed
and framed all by me I given as it is now by 8 p.m. this
same day.’
Cameron had at last found an outlet for her restless
energy and enthusiasm: ‘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 profi t 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.’ These words, like all her others quoted in this
article, come from the twenty manuscript pages of her
autobiographical fragment Annals of my Glasshouse,
written in 1864 but not published until 1889.
Among the many ‘poets, prophets and painters’ who
came to be photographed at Dimbola were Charles Dar-
win, Benjamin Jowett, Henry Longfellow, James Sped-
ding, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, Anthony Trollope and G.
F. Watts. Others, such as the writers Robert Browning
and Thomas Carlyle, had their portraits taken at Little
Holland House, to which Cameron sometimes took her
equipment. For a select few important subjects, such as
Herschel, she went to their homes. By determined ap-
plication over roughly a decade, she assembled a large
portfolio of fi ne ‘close-up’ portraits of male heads,
virtually life size by virtue of the large negatives she
used (at fi rst 11" × 9" and later 15" × 12"), photographic
equivalents of the series which G. F. Watts painted as
a ‘Hall of Fame and donated to London’s National
Portrait Gallery.
These extraordinarily powerful portraits were argu-
ably the fi rst ‘close-up’ photographs in history (had the
Frenchman Nadar made larger prints, he might have
had a prior claim). All taken against a totally dark back-
ground, they show only the sitters’ head and shoulders,
while their bodies are draped in dark cloth. Some are
in profi le—a rather unnatural way of looking at people.
Perhaps this was prompted by the intense interest at the
time in human physiognomy as an indicator of character,
and the widely practised ‘science’ of phrenology—de-
ducing the power and range of a person’s mental abili-
ties from the shape of the head. Cameron’s remarkably
virtuoso control of lighting in these close-ups—usually
from the top, from one side only—certainly highlights
every detail, valley and bump.
Cameron’s photographs of ‘maidens’ are blander
and less dramatic. Though she did photograph such
female celebrities as Marianne North and Marie Spartali
(painters), Anne Thackeray (Thackeray’s daughter, a
successful author in her own right) and Christina Ros-
setti (no print of this portrait is known to survive), it
was extremely diffi cult for women in Victorian Britain
to achieve public status in their own right. Most of
Cameron’s female subjects were family and friends,
and her main criterion for selecting them was their
beauty—especially the sort of long-necked, long-haired,
immature beauty familiar in Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Two of her favourite models were maids in the Cameron
household—Mary Ann Hillier (frequently seen as some
Madonna or other) and Mary Ryan, an Irish beggar girl
whom Cameron had taken on at least partly, it seems,
because of her good looks. The majority of her female
models were teenagers, though their dress often makes
them look older. With such subjects, she draws her
camera back from its extreme close-up position, uncov-
ers all the windows in her glasshouse studio and makes
everything softer and prettier.
The children who appeared in her photographs were
often local, too. Young Freddy Gould, who was posed
as several Biblical characters, including Christ, wasCAMERON, JULIA MARGARET
Cameron, Julia Margaret. Zoe, Maid of Athens.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Rubel Collection,
Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas
H. Lee, and Muriel Kallis Newman Gifts, 1997 (1997.382.38)
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.