Early life and education Julia Margaret Cameron was born
Julia Margaret Pattle on 11 June 1815, at
Garden Reach in
Calcutta, India, to Adeline Marie and James Peter Pattle. James Pattle worked in India for the
East India Company. His family had been involved with the Company for many years. He traced his line to a 17th-century ancestor living in Chancery Lane, London. Adeline's mother was a French aristocrat and the daughter of Chevalier Ambrose Pierre Antoine de l'Etang, who had been a page to
Marie Antoinette and an officer in the
Garde du Corps of King
Louis XVI. After James died in Calcutta, he was shipped back to London in a barrel of rum for burial in Camberwell. Julia was the fourth of ten children, three of whom died in infancy. Julia and six of her sisters They favoured Indian silks and shawls rather than the Victorian attire of other colonial women. The sisters were sent to France as children to be educated, Julia living there with her maternal grandmother in
Versailles from 1818 to 1834, after which she returned to India. Julia's sisters all made advantageous matches. Older sister Adeline married Lt-General Colin Mackenzie. Sophia married Sir John Warrander Dalrymple. Louisa married Henry Vincent Bayley, a high court judge. Maria married Dr John Jackson, and among their children was Julia's godchild
Julia Stephen. Sara (Sarah) married Sir
Henry Thoby Prinsep, a director of the East India Company, and made their home at
Little Holland House in
Kensington, which became an important intellectual centre. Virginia Pattle married
Charles Somers-Cocks, Viscount Eastnor (later 3rd Earl Somers). Their eldest daughter was
Lady Henry Somerset, the temperance leader, while the younger,
Lady Adeline Marie, became the Duchess of Bedford.
Marriage and social life South Africa and Calcutta In 1835, after suffering several illnesses, Julia visited the
Cape of Good Hope in South Africa with her parents to recover. In all, the Camerons raised 11 children, five of her own, five orphaned children of relatives, and an Irish girl named Mary Ryan whom they found begging on Putney Heath and whom Cameron used as a model in her photographs. Their son,
Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, would also become a photographer. Julia often visited
Little Holland House where her sister,
Sara Prinsep, oversaw a literary and artistic salon "of
Pre-Raphaelite painters, poets, and aristocrats with artistic pretensions".
Benjamin Jowett echoed this when describing Cameron's reverence to these artists and poets after a later visit to Freshwater. The same salon-like atmosphere was present. "She is a sort of hero-worshipper, and the hero is not Mr Tennyson – he only occupies second place – but Henry Taylor." where they were neighbours of Taylor, In 1860, after an extended visit to Tennyson at Freshwater, Cameron bought a house next door. The family moved there, naming the property "
Dimbola" after one of the coffee plantations in Ceylon.
Photography career Early career Cameron showed an interest in photography in the late 1850s and there are indications that she experimented with making photographs in the early 1860s. Cameron converted a chicken coop into studio space. Later, in an unfinished autobiography,
Annals of my Glasshouse, she wrote: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 profit 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. She presented a series of photographs,
The Fruits of the Spirit, to the
British Museum, and held her first solo exhibition in November 1865. Her prints generated robust demand and she showed her work throughout Europe, securing awards in Berlin in 1865 and 1866, and an honourable mention in Dublin. Her photographic activity was supported by her husband. Cameron wrote: "My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause." In August 1865, the South Kensington Museum (now the
Victoria and Albert Museum), purchased 80 of her photographs. Three years later, it offered her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, making her the museum's first artist-in-residence. , 1867 She produced images of
Thomas Carlyle and John Herschel in 1867. By 1868, she was generating sales through P. & D. Colnaghi and a second London agent, William Spooner. In 1869, she created
The Kiss of Peace, which she considered her finest work. In the early 1870s, Cameron's work matured. Her elaborate illustrative tableaux involving religious, literary, and classical figures peaked in a series of images for Tennyson's
Idylls of the King, published in 1874 and 1875, evidently at her expense. During this time, she also wrote
Annals of my Glass House.
Later life In October 1873, her daughter died in childbirth. Two years later, because of her husband's ill-health, the lower cost of living, and to be near to their sons who were managing the family coffee plantations, Cameron and her husband left Freshwater for Ceylon with "a cow, Cameron's photographic equipment, and two coffins, in case such items should not be available in the East". Henry Taylor recounts the departure:Mr. and Mrs. Cameron have taken their departure for Ceylon, there to live and die. He had bought an estate there some thirty years ago when he was serving the Crown there and elsewhere in the East, and he had a passionate love for the island, to which he had rendered an important service in providing it with a code of procedure ... he never ceased to yearn after the island as his place of abode, and thither in his eighty-first year he has betaken himself, with a strange joy. The design was kept secret, – I believe even from their dearest relatives.V.C. Scott O'Connor later wrote about their empty home in Freshwater:The house is silent now and tenantless. All its old feverish life and bustle are stilled as is the heart which beat here in true sympathy with every living creature that came within its reach needing such succor. Her pretty maids, her scholars, her poets, her philosophers, astronomers, and divines, all those men of genius who came and sat willingly to her while in a fever of artistic emotion she plied the instruments of her art, – they have all gone, and silence is the only tenant left at Dimbola.The move marked the end of Cameron's photography career; she took few photographs afterwards, mostly of
Tamil servants and workers. Fewer than 30 images survive from this period. Cameron's output may have dropped in part because of the difficulty working with collodion in the heat and a lack of fresh water for washing prints. The botanical painter and biologist
Marianne North recounted a visit to Cameron in Ceylon:The walls of the room were covered with magnificent photographs; others were tumbling about the tables, chairs, and floors with quantities of damp books, all untidy and picturesque; the lady herself with a lace veil on her head and flowing draperies. Her oddities were most refreshing . . . She also made some studies of natives while I was there, and took such a fancy to the back of one of them (which she said was absolutely superb) that she insisted on her son retaining him as her gardener, though she had no garden and he did not know even the meaning of the word. In 1875, after a short visit to England, Cameron fell ill with a dangerous chill. In February 1876, ''Macmillan's Magazine
published her poem, On a Portrait
. The following year, her image The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere
appeared on the cover Harper's Weekly'' as a wood engraving. Cameron died on 26 January 1879 at the Glencairn estate in Ceylon. It is often reported that her last word was "Beauty" or "Beautiful". In her 12-year career, Cameron produced about 900 photographs. == Photographic work ==