Matron saint of Victorian greats

High profile: Charles Darwin
The Weekender

Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for exclusive competitions, offers and theatre ticket deals

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

Photography was still young when Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron first operated a camera, but the lady herself was (by the standards of her day) quite old. She first resorted to the genteel novelty at the age of 48, drawn to it partly as a way to fill the lonely hours while her husband and son were away on the business of Empire. Within barely a year, by 1865, she was producing photographs as fine as any that vast Empire had so far seen.

Within another two years, by 1866-7, she was producing photographs as fine as any that have ever been taken. She ought to be recognised as the matron saint of every mature housewife returning to the job market, and of all late starters in any art or science.

Almost every book on early photography treats her with due respect and some of her portraits - the so-called Dirty Monk study of her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, and good friend, Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example - will be familiar to almost every literate Briton. And yet, despite her canonical status, it has usually been hard to see more than a handful of her original prints at any one time, which is why the National Portrait Gallery's superb new show is instructive as well as delightful.

Authoritatively curated by the pioneering scholar of Mrs Cameron's work, Colin Ford, the exhibition examines every phase of her short but intensely productive career.

At the beginning, the tentative family portraits of her novice months; at the end, the enigmatic (and, until now, little-known) portraits and semi-ethnological studies she made in Ceylon, where she spent the last four years of her life, from 1875 to 1879, supporting her husband's painful efforts to rescue their coffee plantation from financial ruin.

In between these extremes lies a rich and varied body of work, some of it a little out of line with 21st century tastes, some of it simply glorious, all of it the product of scrupulous preparation and rapidly developing skill - no matter how much the Victorian gentleman critics may have tutted about the softness of her focus.

Ford has arranged this work thematically: portraits of women, portraits of children, religious allegories derived from painters of the Italian Renaissance, illustrations for Tennyson's Idylls of the King and other books.

One of Ford's intentions is to solicit renewed sympathy for the religious and literary pictures, generally written off in recent years as a lamentable lapse into kitsch.

In at least one case, he succeeds: the image of a frankfaced little girl with angel wings now looks less like sickly piety than a weird, half-comic anticipation of surrealism.

Towering above all, there are her portraits of men: the more or less unknown, such as Iago, whose preposterously handsome face, all razor blade cheekbones and unrazored jaw, would not look out of place in a Scorsese movie; and, of course, the greats.

Mrs Cameron shared her era's robust belief in, and admiration for, Great Men and thanks to her camera, we can still see them through uncynical eyes that could always detect the blazing spirit inside the creased and sagging flesh of, among others, Darwin, Carlyle and the scientist Sir John Herschell. (Her wonderful picture entitled The Astronomer is at once noble and scary. It would make a suitable cover for a novel by Samuel Beckett.)

In capturing the unsmiling face of Victorian greatness, this previously obscure lady staked a major claim to greatness in her own right. Like the earliest practitioners of jazz, she went straight to the heart of a youthful medium and did things with it that have never been bettered. Cameras have improved; eyes have not.

  • The Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition will be showing at the National Portrait Gallery until 18 May. Information: 020 7306 0055.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in