Date: 1865
Present Location: On Tour of United States
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Photograph on Albumen Paper
Condition: Good
Size: 30.6 X 26.5 cm (12 X 10.5 in)

Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879, was born in Calcutta, India, the fourth child of Scotsman James Pattle, a high official in the Bengal Civil Service of the Honourable East India Company and his French wife Adeline de l'Etang.  At three years old, she and her six sisters were sent to France to be reared by her maternal grandmother, after which Julia finished her education in England.  From her mother she inherited good taste and a well developed esthetic sense.¹

In 1834, Julia returned to Calcutta, where she met and four years later married Charles Hay Cameron (1795-1880), a barrister and law reformer whose father was Governor of Malta and of the Bahamas.

The Camerons returned to England in 1848 and, in due time, had six children.  It was there, in 1863, that she took up photography at the age of forty eight at the suggestion of her daughter, Julia, and her husband who, to this end, presented Julia Margaret with a large wooden camera and darkroom outfit.  This new interest, it was hoped, would break her increasing depression over her husband's absence on business trips to India.

Julia threw herself into photography with a passion, building a darkroom onto her home and often working over glass negatives and chemicals into the early light of morning.  She had found an artist's purpose for her life.  And she was helped along in her purpose by two fortunate circumstances: her need to express her artistic creativity and her proximity, by virtue of station in life, to some of the greatest literary, artistic and scientific personalities in England.  These people she could call friends, and they became caught up, willing or not, in her new hobby, as she insisted they sit for her camera.  By all accounts a hard taskmaster, she would not take "no" for an answer, and because of her perseverance, posterity has stunning portraits of Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Sir John Herschel and many others; and this in the infancy of photography, when the difficulties of the process were daunting, even for trained scientists.  She explained her aim in portraiture in her 1874 autobiographical fragment "Annals of My Glass House" thusly:

When I have had such men before my camera (as Sir John Herschel, etc.) my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.²

Julia Cameron's work extends over sixteen years, from 1863 until her death, and may be divided into four periods.  The first, 1864-66, contains portraits (the most notable of which is of Ellen Terry), religious subjects (e.g. "The Three Marys"), and the symbolical and allegorical "Allegorical Study, 1865," among others of the same genre.

The second period, 1867-70, is considered by photographic historian Helmut Gernsheim to contain her best work.³   During these four years, most of her noteworthy portraits of famous men were taken.  Her treatment of men is simple and straightforward, whereas she portrays women as models for personages from poetry or legend.  "The Echo" is an example of her treatment of women.  Among her religious pictures are "Rachel," and "The Nativity."

Her third period, 1871-75, is devoted chiefly to illustrations of poetry, especially Tennyson's.   "The Idylls of the King" is an example.   She did, however, accomplish religious subjects (e.g. "St. John the Baptist"), legendary or symbolical figures (e.g. "The Rising of the New Year"), and an anecdotal "Pray God, Bring Father Safely Home."

Her final period, 1876-78, saw very little productivity.   These photographs, taken in India, are classified as amateurish and of little or no artistic worth.⁴

All of Julia Cameron's photographs were made from glass plate collodion negatives using the "wet plate" process and printed on albumen silver coated paper.  Prior to the middle of the 1850's, albumen (egg white) coated paper was prepared by the photographer--a time-consuming and laborious task.   By the end of the 1850's, however, albumen paper was commercially available, and the practitioner had only to sensitize the paper by floating it on a solution of silver nitrate.⁵

"Allegorical Study, 1865," as previously mentioned, is from Cameron's prolific first period, and is one of a number of works showing her admiration of the Italian Old Masters--this one probably an imitation of Perugino, the contemporary of Leonardo and teacher of Raphael.⁶   Emulation of the Italian Old Masters' themes was much loved by the English of the period, and by such artists as the aforementioned Pre-Raphaelites as well.   The photograph depicts a seated, white robed woman, crossed hands upon her breast, head bowed and with eyes half-closed as if in a meditative trance.   She takes up approximately one third of the frame on the left side and over half of the bottom, laterally.   She faces a young child of eight or nine years who, also white robed, kneels in supplication before her, an offering of white lilies in hand.   Between the two figures, a vase of white lilies with blossoms in two tiers rests upon a support (possibly a small table) hidden from view by the woman's legs.

The odd shape of this print is probably due to one or both of two reasons:  1) Cameron had a habit of trimming her prints according to whim, and/or 2) albumen prints were often cut, sometimes right to the edge of the image to conserve gold in the gold toning bath.⁷

The picture's coloration ranges from a dark brown in the deepest shadows to light sepia and off-white in the mid tones and highlights.   This is fairly typical of gold toned albumen prints of the 1860's.   It should be remembered, however, that this work belongs to Cameron's first period, when she was still struggling to learn the craft and only two years into the use of its technology.  We may, in this light, permit some slight underexposure as we see overall, and lack of overall sharpness as well.   Also, considering the age of the print, what we now attribute to underexposure may, at least in part, be due to fading.   But to return to the lack of sharpness, a trait common to most of her photographs, there are a number of proposed explanations.   Through the years, some have thought it the fault of her lens, while others blamed a combination of the lens and her general lack of proper concern for professional standards.   Still others believed she purposely threw her pictures out of focus to emulate the "soft focus" effect advocated by a leading school of photographers during the period in which she worked.   Cameron herself stated in "Annals" that:

When focussing and coming to something which to my eye was very
beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more
definite focus which all other photographers insist upon. ⁸

The composition of "Allegorical Study" I find appealing, if rather painterly.  Cameron unabashedly copies the somewhat typical "madonna and child" composition of the Italian Renaissance masters.   There is a diagonal line, running top left from the woman's head through the top tier of lilies in the vase, to the child's head, mid frame vertically on the right.   And the eye is led in a circular fashion from her head, upper left, down her torso, through the line described by her legs, up through the child's body and head, to the top tier of lilies and back again to the woman's head.

There is a rather large and curious light-colored mass in the upper right corner of the picture.   Could this be Cameron's attempt to add a "cloud" to the negative?   Or is it, perhaps, a chemical mishap?   Close scrutiny suggests the former explanation, as it also appears she attempted to create a halo around the woman's head, possibly with her finger on the still-wet plate.   Whatever the origin of the mass, it does provide an interesting counterbalance to the L-shaped white volume of the female's robe in the middle to lower left of the frame.    Indeed, it may have been an attempt to create a smoother path for the eye, since it provides a more perfect circle to follow.

Space in "Allegorical Study" is handled in a manner giving the picture a look of extreme flatness.   If lack of depth was intentional, Cameron achieved it dramatically, with her subjects being so pressed to the picture's edge they almost spill out of the frame.    There is virtually no space apparent, either, between the figures and the background.  This photograph is as two-dimensional as any painting of a similar scene could be, and this may have been achieved by design to imitate the flatness of the painted surface.

Lighting is rather harsh, probably coming from a window above and to the left of camera axis, yet, paradoxically, casting soft shadows on the woman's face and creating a wonderful sense of modeling.    The child's face is in full, unflattering and shadowless illumination.

This photograph was taken for Julia Margaret's sister Maria "Mia" Pattle Jackson, to be included in an album of other photographs Julia began to send her in 1863.   This album, in addition to Cameron's works, contained photographs taken by some of her photographer friends, notably Oscar Rejlander and Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson).

131 Years have passed since "Allegorical Study, 1865" was taken, and in that time Julia Margaret Cameron's work has ceased to be as controversial as it was then.   Her "faulty technique,"   so much talked of and complained about during her lifetime, has been accepted and has endeared her photographs to us in this day, giving us truly priceless vignettes of Victorian England's fairest and finest.   If the majority of her theme pictures today appear to us affected, ludicrous and amateurish, we must consider them errors of taste peculiar to Cameron and her era, and look beyond them to the masterly handling of her straightforward and truthful portraits which have made her work so important.    Her most ambitious projects, like "Allegorical Study, 1865, "  should be understood  for what they are: serious, heart-felt, almost driven attempts at imitation of fine art painting through the new medium of photography.   In this, Cameron was little different from many others, but she was not a painter-turned-photographer as so many were, and so lacked a trained painter's eye for composition.   Since the odds against creating the perfect picture increase exponentially the greater the number of subjects involved, it is no great wonder that she was far more successful with portraits.

That a lady of the English upper class would struggle so for her art--personally hauling buckets of water from a well to wash prints; suffering chemically stained hands and clothing; imposing her photography on all around her to the point of severely straining friendships--is truly remarkable.  Ironically, some of her painter friends, like Rossetti, whose stars shone so brightly during their lifetimes and who most likely condescended to tolerate the eccentricities of this woman untrained in the arts, are now relegated to mere historical footnotes, while Julia's star is in the ascension, burning brighter by the day it seems, even now, 117 years after her death.

Her acknowledged importance to the history of photography is testimony that Julia Margaret Cameron's legacy is more than a mere collection of photographs; hers is the passing down to future generations of unique moments in time which, without her presence and vision, would not otherwise exist.
 

Postscript

On Identification of Sitters for "Allegorical Study, 1865"
 

This image, as a part of the "Mia" Album, remained in private hands from the 1860's until 1974, when the album was sold to a consortium of dealers and collectors who took it apart with the intention of selling the images separately.   Fortunately, the entire album was purchased by one collector in order to keep the images together.   As this is not one of the more publicized albums Julia Margaret Cameron assembled (like the one she gave Sir John Herschel), and its first public exhibition began in 1994, there has probably not yet been sufficient time for a thorough digestion of all the photographs.   All that seems available on some is what is recorded in the exhibition catalog (see Bibliography).  Concerning "Allegorical Study," the entry on page 63 makes no mention of the characters' names.   April Watson, in her introduction to the catalog, says Cameron often posed her servants in theatrical garb, but never family members, so on that basis I assume the sitters for this photograph were not family.
 
 

¹  Gernsheim, Helmut.  Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work.  New York: Aperture, Inc., 1975. P. 17

²  Ibid., P. 182

³  Ibid., P.82

⁴  Ibid., P. 83

⁵  Crawford, William.  The Keepers of Light.  New York: Morgan and Morgan, 1979. P. 45

⁶  For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron.     Exhibition Catalog.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1994.  P. 63

⁷  Crawford.  Op. cit. P. 47

⁸  Gernsheim.  Op. cit.  P. 70

1.  Crawford, William.  The Keepers of Light.  New York: Morgan and Morgan, 1979

2.  For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron.  Exhibition Catalog. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1994

3.  Gernsheim, Helmut.  Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work.  New York: Aperture, Inc., 1975

4.  Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron.  Powell, T., ed.  Boston: The Hogarth Press, 1973
 
 

Last Revised: 28Dec11

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