Julia Margaret Cameron
Dec. 14th, 2023 08:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo Few great photographers are so distinctive that you can identify an image as theirs at a glance. One such- and I'm having difficulty thinking of a second- is Julia Margaret Cameron. Her pictures are soft and shadowy, not always in focus (something contemporaries laughed at) and of a visionary intensity. I don't know how she did it. Photography isn't hard. You frame your subject, you work the shutter, you develop the iphotographic plate or paper. Thousands of people- professionals and amateurs- were working this simple magic in the Victorian age- using a range of different processes- but only Cameron produced images of such transcendence.
She was happily placed. She lived just down the road- or lane, rather, from Alfred Tennyson's holiday home- Farringford- on the Isle of Wight. I've walked that lane and very rocky and pitted it is too. She was a mate of Tennyson's- and there's a nice story of her despatching her grand piano up the lane to Farringford because Edward Lear (yes, that Edward Lear) had set some of Tennyson's poems to music and Tennyson wanted to hear them performed. The great men of the age converged on Farringford- and Cameron got to photograph them all. Is it true that Tennyson once said to his house guests, "Oh Lord. Mrs Cameron's coming with her photographic equipment, let's hide!" ? I rather hope so. She was a commanding woman- formidable- and no one escaped. She tracked them down, she got them up in fancy dress (if need be) and then she fixed them- Tennyson himself, Robert Browning, Benjamin Jowett, Charles Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, producing, in most cases, the definitive portrait. When literary lions and great scientists weren't to be had she produced equally telling images of daughters, housemaids and professional models. Yesterday I posted a picture of her husband Charles Hay Cameron. Here are three more...
This is Tennyson. Victorian superstar and greatest lyric poet of the age. A very clean man who liked to take several baths a day, he disliked this portrait and dubbed it "the dirty monk". Yes, but poets should have higher things on their mind than personal grooming and this picture says as much.
Cameron called this one "Iago" I don't think we know who the sitter was, but we're assured that he was a bona fide Italian. What a tremendous face. forceful, inward, unfathomed...
And here is no less a personage that Alice in Wonderland - Alice Pleasance Liddell, now no longer a little girl but a soulful, combative teenager. The pre-Raphaelites attempted this kind of thing in paint but none of them was as good at it as Mrs Cameron. You can keep your Rossettis, this is the very quintessence of high Victorian womanhood. Mrs C called it "Pomona"- and yes, she has transformed sulky Alice into the vey goddess of fruit and flowers...
She was happily placed. She lived just down the road- or lane, rather, from Alfred Tennyson's holiday home- Farringford- on the Isle of Wight. I've walked that lane and very rocky and pitted it is too. She was a mate of Tennyson's- and there's a nice story of her despatching her grand piano up the lane to Farringford because Edward Lear (yes, that Edward Lear) had set some of Tennyson's poems to music and Tennyson wanted to hear them performed. The great men of the age converged on Farringford- and Cameron got to photograph them all. Is it true that Tennyson once said to his house guests, "Oh Lord. Mrs Cameron's coming with her photographic equipment, let's hide!" ? I rather hope so. She was a commanding woman- formidable- and no one escaped. She tracked them down, she got them up in fancy dress (if need be) and then she fixed them- Tennyson himself, Robert Browning, Benjamin Jowett, Charles Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, producing, in most cases, the definitive portrait. When literary lions and great scientists weren't to be had she produced equally telling images of daughters, housemaids and professional models. Yesterday I posted a picture of her husband Charles Hay Cameron. Here are three more...
This is Tennyson. Victorian superstar and greatest lyric poet of the age. A very clean man who liked to take several baths a day, he disliked this portrait and dubbed it "the dirty monk". Yes, but poets should have higher things on their mind than personal grooming and this picture says as much.
Cameron called this one "Iago" I don't think we know who the sitter was, but we're assured that he was a bona fide Italian. What a tremendous face. forceful, inward, unfathomed...
And here is no less a personage that Alice in Wonderland - Alice Pleasance Liddell, now no longer a little girl but a soulful, combative teenager. The pre-Raphaelites attempted this kind of thing in paint but none of them was as good at it as Mrs Cameron. You can keep your Rossettis, this is the very quintessence of high Victorian womanhood. Mrs C called it "Pomona"- and yes, she has transformed sulky Alice into the vey goddess of fruit and flowers...
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Date: 2023-12-14 09:50 am (UTC)He would be as much of a model today: those deep-cut eyes, those cheekbones.
Mrs C called it "Pomona"- and yes, she has transformed sulky Alice into the vey goddess of fruit and flowers...
I can't remember if I'd seen this picture of Liddell before, but I love it. She looks imperious, but not humanly; she might be growing out of the leaves, or them into her.
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Date: 2023-12-14 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-14 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-14 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-14 03:10 pm (UTC)Alice looks petulant. Which is her defining characteristic in Carroll's books as well.
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Date: 2023-12-14 03:56 pm (UTC)Lewis Carroll and Mrs Cameron- two of my very favourite Victorians.