260
the son of a fi sherman. With him are often seen one or
more of the four children of Thomas Keown, Master
Gunner at Freshwater Redoubt, the Royal Artillery fort
within sight of ‘Dimbola.’ One of the few local men
portrayed as himself rather than as a fi ctional character
was a young artilleryman, and offi cers from the fort were
often entertained at Dimbola, sometimes taking part in
productions at ‘Mrs Cameron’s Thatched Theatre,’ in
its grounds.
Though Cameron obviously had a taste for fancy
dress—perhaps partly as a result of David Wilkie
Wynfi eld’s teaching—she never seems to have photo-
graphed scenes from the plays staged in her theatre.
She did take the young Lionel Tennyson in costume
as the Marquis of St. Cast, a character in Tom Taylor’s
potboiler Payment on Demand, typical of the Victo-
rian melodramas and farces she put on, despite her
otherwise rather sophisticated literary tastes. The
home-made settings and heightened gestures used in
her literary illustrations and genre scenes have a clear
affi nity with nineteenth century photographs of such
performances and even the fi rst efforts of silent fi lm-
makers two decades later.
Though Cameron had made illustrations of liter-
ary, classical and Biblical stories throughout her short
photographic career, this element of her work came to
an obsessive peak toward the end of that decade, when
she made—at Tennyson’s suggestion—a series of il-
lustrations for his Idylls of the King and other poems.
These were published, probably largely at her own
expenses, in two large format volumes, in 1874 and
- Her visualisations of poetry are different in style
and achievement from those of any other photographer
of the time. Her contemporaries decorated books of
poetry by Burns, Gray, Milton, Scott, Shakespeare
and others with picturesque landscapes, occasionally
peopling these with attractively disposed fi gures in the
scenery, but rarely illustrating actual characters or in-
cidents from the story. Cameron certainly shares some
of their taste for romantic imagery, but her illustrations
are tougher, often conveying strong emotions—tragic
as well as romantic.
It has been persuasively argued that many of
them—not just the considerable number with Biblical
or religious titles—were informed by her enthusiasm
for Christianity but today, when public knowledge of
such stories and symbols, and of classical literature, is
minimal, her pictures still have a powerful directness
and emotional impact.
In October 1875, at the height of Cameron’s fame,
she and Charles suddenly left Freshwater to return to
Ceylon. As far as we know, she photographed only one
celebrity there—Marianne North, the botanical painter.
Cameron did take some pictures of ‘natives’ as she
described them (just as she had called the residents of
the Isle of Wight ‘peasants’). But she took relatively
few, even of these, and her photographic career was
almost over. In 1879 she died and—as has often been
quoted—the last word to pass her lips was ‘Beauty.’
Whether the story is true or not, no word could have
been more appropriate.
Colin FordBiography
Julia Margaret Cameron was born on 1815 in Calcutta,
India. An extremely energetic and talented writer and
artist, in an age when it was diffi cult for women to
achieve success in such fi elds, she became interested in
photography in the late 1850s, and took it up seriously at
the beginning of 1864, having been given a large camera
by her daughter and son-in-law.
She instantly began to take a series of compelling
portraits (many of them, especially those of intellec-
tual and artistic men of the day, in extreme close-up),
illustrations of Biblical scenes, and of literature. Her
enthusiasm for staging scenes from literature reached
its peak in two volumes of illustrations for her friend
Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and other poems,
published—largely at her own expense, it seems—in
1874 and 1875. Soon after, she and her husband left
England to live in Ceylon, where he owned coffee
plantations. She took a few photographs there, but spent
most of her time helping her husband and his family run
their estates. She died in 1879.
See Also: Portraiture. Herschel, Sir John Frederick
William; and Wynfi eld, David Wilkie.Further Reading
Ford, Colin, The Cameron Collection, London and New York,
Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975.
Gernsheim, Helmut, Julia Margaret Cameron (rev. ed.), New
York, Aperture, 1975.
Violet Hamilton, Annals of My Glass House, Photographs by
Julia Margaret Cameron, Claremont, Scripps College and The
University of Washington Press (exhibition catalogue).
Jeremy Howard and Pam Roberts, The Whisper of the Muse, The
World of Julia Margaret Cameron, London, P & D Colnaghi
(exhibition catalogue).
Lukitsh, Joanne, Cameron: Her Work and Career, Rochester,
International Museum of Photography at George Eastman
House, 1986 (exhibition catalogue).
Weaver, Mike, Julia Margaret Cameron 1815–1879, South-
ampton University and The Herbert Press, 1984 (exhibition
catalogue).
Mike Weaver, Whisper of the Muse, The Overstone Album &
Other Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, Malibu, The
J Paul Getty Museum, 1986 (exhibition catalogue).
Wolf, Sylvia, Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women, The Art Insti-
tute of Chicago & Yale University Press, 1998 (exhibition
catalogue).