Julia Margaret Cameron
Pioneering portraitist of the Victorian era
Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) is regarded as a major 19th-century portraitist. Her signature style involved soft-focus close-ups of notable Victorians, as well as staged scenes drawn from mythology, Christianity, and literature.
Born in Calcutta as Julia Margaret Pattle, she was the fourth of ten children, three of whom died in infancy. Her father worked for the East India Company; her mother’s side included a French aristocrat whose father had been a page to Marie Antoinette. The seven surviving Pattle sisters were known for their unconventional behaviour and dress, favouring Indian silks over typical Victorian attire. Julia spent much of her childhood in France, living with her maternal grandmother in Versailles from 1818 to 1834 before returning to India.
In 1835, while convalescing in South Africa, she met astronomer Sir John Herschel and Charles Hay Cameron, a legal reformer twenty years her senior. She married Cameron in Calcutta on 1 February 1838. Herschel became godfather to their first child, born that December. Over the next 14 years, the couple raised eleven children: five of their own, five orphaned relatives, and an Irish girl found begging on Putney Heath. Their son Henry Herschel Hay Cameron also became a photographer.
Through the early 1840s, Cameron organised social events for the Governor-General and became a prominent hostess in Anglo-Indian society. Herschel had told her about photography’s invention in 1839, and three years later sent her the first photographs she ever saw—two dozen calotypes and daguerreotypes.
The family moved to England in 1845, where Julia frequented Little Holland House, the Kensington home of her sister Sara Prinsep. That salon drew Pre-Raphaelite painters, poets, and aristocrats, introducing her to future portrait subjects like Henry Taylor and Alfred Tennyson.
Cameron took up photography at age 48, after her daughter gave her a camera. Over 12 years she produced roughly 900 photographs, compiling many into albums such as *The Norman Album*. Her work was controversial: critics dismissed her soft focus and unrefined images as amateurish, yet her portraits of figures like Charles Darwin, Sir John Herschel, and Henry Taylor were consistently praised. Her images have been called “extraordinarily powerful” and “wholly original,” and she is credited with creating the first close-ups in photography.
Quick Facts
- Birth Name
- Julia Margaret Pattle
- Birth Date
- 1815-06-11
- Birth Place
- Calcutta, Bengal Presidency
- Death Date
- 1879-01-26
- Death Place
- Kalutara, British Ceylon
- Field
- Photography
- Spouse
- Charles Hay Cameron · 1838
- Children
- 11 (6 adopted)
- Relatives
- Julia Prinsep Stephen (niece) / Herman Norman (grandson) / Virginia Woolf (great-niece) / Vanessa Bell (great-niece)
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
She was born in Calcutta, and after establishing herself among the Anglo-Indian upper-class, she moved to London where she made connections with the cultural elite. She then formed her own literary salon in the seaside village of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Cameron took up photography at the age of 48, after her daughter gave her a camera as a present. She quickly produced a large body of portraits, and created allegorical images inspired by tableaux vivants, theatre, 15th-century Italian painters, and contemporary artists. She gathered much of her work in albums, including The Norman Album. She took around 900 photographs over a 12-year period. Cameron's work was contentious. Critics derided her softly focused and unrefined images, and considered her illustrative photographs amateurish. However, her portraits of artists and scientists such as Henry Taylor, Charles Darwin and Sir John Herschel have been consistently praised. Her images have been described as 'extraordinarily powerful' and 'wholly original', and she has been credited with producing the first close-ups in the medium.
Reader's Guide
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. She was the fourth of ten children. The seven sisters were known for their 'charm, wit and beauty' and for being close, outspoken, and unconventional in behaviour and dress. 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. In 1835, after suffering several illnesses, Julia visited the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa with her parents to recover. While there, she met the British astronomer and photochemist Sir John Herschel. She also met Charles Hay Cameron, twenty years her senior and a reformer of Indian law and education who later invested in coffee plantations in what is now Sri Lanka. They were married in Calcutta on 1 February 1838. Between 1839 and 1852, they had six children, one of whom was adopted. In all, the Camerons raised 11 children. Their son, Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, would also become a photographer. Through the early 1840s—as the organiser of social engagements for the Governor-General, Lord Hardinge—Cameron became a prominent hostess in Anglo-Indian society. During this time she also corresponded with Herschel. In 1839, he told Cameron about the invention of photography. In 1842, he sent her two dozen calotypes and daguerreotypes, the first photographs she ever saw. The Camerons moved to England in 1845, where they took part in London's artistic and cultural scene. In 1847, she was writing poetry, had started a novel, and published a translation of Gottfried August Bürger's Leonora. In 1848, Charles Cameron retired and invested in coffee and rubber plantations in Ceylon. The Camerons settled in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, then moved to East Sheen in 1850. 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. Cameron lived there until 1875. Around 1863, her daughter and son-in-law gave her a sliding-box camera for Christmas. Cameron converted a chicken coop into studio space.
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