Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron’s innovative use of focus, the vaguely Renaissance costume, and the sitter’s unfocused gaze suggest the subject’s inner life. Such allegorical intonations were common in Cameron’s work, particularly for her female sitters. She wrote: “My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.”

Cameron took portraits of many of the English artists and intellectuals who made up her circle of close family friends. This example was made in a studio she briefly occupied at the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A.