Autumn/Winter 2022

“A tender ardour”
Julia Margaret Cameron
By Linda Falcone
Calcutta-born British photographer Julia
Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was about
my age when she received her first
camera at 48 – as a gift from her daughter and
son-and-law. It was a suitable present, they
thought, for a woman who needed quite a lot to
keep her occupied. She had
raised five of her relatives’
children and had five of
her own – in addition to
adopting a young Irish girl,
whom she found begging on
Putney Heath. The gift was
“to amuse you, Mother, to try
and photograph during your
solitude.”
In her own words, Julia
handled the camera with
“tender ardour” from the
time she shot what she
referred to as her “first
success” in 1864 – the
photo of a girl called Annie
Philpot, which she purposely
blurred to suggest the child’s
movement, rather than
seeking the usual stoic pose Victorians imposed
upon photographed children.
Julia would transform her estate’s henhouse
into her first darkroom, which she called the ‘glass
house’ and used it to produce dreamy pictures
that photographers hated and artists loved.
Cameron’s only natural daughter – also named
Julia – was right about the gift being an antidote
to solitude. The whole world – or at least the
whole Isle of Wight – was coaxed or commanded
in front of her camera. House workers or hapless
tourists admiring the beach
were somehow lured back
to her ‘lair’ to pose for a
tableau scene, transformed
into characters born in the
mind of Milton. They would
become the Greek poet
Sappho or King Lear’s sad
daughters. The neighbour’s
hired help was dolled up
and made to carry the
Madonna’s Annunciation
lily. Strapped-on swan wings
were a common feature in
her photographs. And in the
buzz and glory of it all, she
treated genius scientists
and humble seamstresses
exactly the same.
Lucky for us, the Isle
of Wight was brimming with the vacationing
elite, which secured for posterity some of the
most important portraits of nineteenth-century
British writers, scientists and poets ever taken.
Poet Alfred Tennyson asked Julia to photograph
Autumn / Winter 2022 • Restoration Conversations 15