258
the founder members of the brotherhood in May 1892
and he was known to the brotherhood by the pseudonym
‘Vintner.’
Cameron is listed in London trade directories as the
operating a studio at 70 Mortimer Street in London from
1886, subsequently occupying premises at 20 Mortimer
Street and in Hanover Square into the 20th century.
His technique—in a reportedly small and cramped
studio—was to use only daylight from a small skylight,
controlled by a simple calico blind.
Simplicity was his trademark, and in a letter pre-
served in the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Collec-
tion at the NMPFT Bradford, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe
remembered Cameron’s advice on dress to a female
sitter—‘As little and simple as possible, madam, just
a wisp of thin muslin over the shoulders will be quite
enough, and will not date the portrait’.
John Hannavy
CAMERON, JULIA MARGARET
(1815–1878)
British photographer of portraits and genre scenes
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in 1815 in Calcutta,
a week before the Battle of Waterloo and a quarter of
a century before the announcement of the invention of
photography. Her father, James Pattle, was an English-
man working in India; her mother, Thérèse l’Etang, was
French. Of the Pattles’ ten children, three died in infancy,
leaving Julia and six sisters, all with dark complexions
and eyes—inherited from their mother’s Indian great
grandmother. As children, all seven girls were sent to
Europe for the sake of their health and their education,
spending much of their childhood with their maternal
grandmother in Paris and Versailles.
At the age of 21, Julia and her parents were in South
Africa, where they had gone—like many other Euro-
peans living and working in India—to convalesce after
illnesses. There she met Charles Hay Cameron, twenty
years her senior and an important fi gure in the British
administration of India. Two years later, back in Cal-
cutta, they were married. In Cape Town, too, Julia met
another man who was to become very important to her
—the astronomer and scientist Sir John Herschel (whom
she was later to call her ‘Teacher and High Priest’).
The newly wed Camerons were soon at the pinnacle
of Anglo-Indian society. Charles had succeeded Lord
Macaulay in 1843 as the only member of the Supreme
Council of India not employed by the East India Com-
pany; a year later, when Sir Henry Hardinge arrived in
Calcutta as Governor, he left his wife in England and
Julia became—at the age of only thirty—his offi cial
hostess. Five years later, the Camerons returned to
England. Charles was not a healthy man, and he seems
to have assumed he could live off the income from his
coffee plantations in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), a country he
had got to fi rst know when writing his 1832 report on
its ‘judicial establishment and procedure.’
Charles and Julia were soon as well placed in fashion-
able London life as they had been in India. The seven
Pattle daughters all made ‘good marriages’ and one,
Sara, had returned to London with her husband, Henry
Thoby Prinsep, fi ve years before the Camerons. The
Prinseps set up house fi rst in fashionable Mayfair, then
in Little Holland House, where they surrounded them-
selves with a coterie of painters (notably George Fred-
erick Watts, who soon moved in), musicians, scientists,
and politicians. By then, the Camerons lived three miles
away and, though the sickly Charles was often confi ned
to his bed, Julia was frequently at Little Holland House,
cultivating the company of the celebrities who would
later become subjects of her portraits. She had already
met two famous poets—Alfred Tennyson and Henry
Taylor (who had been one of Tennyson’s rivals for the
post of Poet laureate in 1850).
In 1853, Tennyson moved to the village of Freshwa-
ter, at the quiet, west end of the Isle of Wight, off the
south coast of England. Six years later, while Charles
Cameron was visiting his estates in Ceylon with two of
their sons, Julia took the two younger boys to stay with
the Tennysons and, apparently on impulse, purchased
two seaside cottages. Tennyson drove a road down
across his estate to the sea to avoid the tourists who
came to stare at one of England’s most famous men (ac-
cording to one witness, he was almost obsessed by the
thought that everyone was staring at him), and opened a
private gate from the grounds of his home, ‘Farringford,’
into those of ‘Dimbola,’ as the Camerons’ house was
called, after one of their estates in Ceylon. Soon, the
two families were attracting as many celebrities of the
day as at Little Holland House.
Organising musical evenings, poetry readings, plays
(she soon built her own theatre) and parties apparently
failed to satisfy Cameron’s restless energy and intellect.
Late in 1863, when Charles was again away in Ceylon,
their daughter Julia and her husband, gave Cameron a
camera ‘It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph
during your solitude at Freshwater.’ There is evidence
that Cameron had taken a few photographs before this,
or at least collaborated with other photographers; she
seems to have experimented with printing other people’s
negatives. She told Herschel that the painter David
Wilkie Wynfi eld, who made a series of photographs of
his fellow painters in fancy dress in the early 1860s, had
given her a lesson. It certainly seems unlikely that her
children would give her a cumbersome 11" × 9" camera,
with its attendant chemical and other accessories, unless
she had already shown some interest in the subject.
Cameron herself dated the beginning of her photo-