Mrs. Herbert Duckworth
Julia Margaret Cameron
April 1867
Julia Margaret Cameron began photographing at age forty-eight, after receiving a camera as a gift from her daughter and son-in-law. She soon became obsessed with photography, reveling in its messy magic and focusing more on the overall effects of her pictures than on technical perfection. Although she made portraits of some of the most important men of her day, Cameron’s female subjects helped her to explore the realm of mythology and imagination in highly allegorical and literary pictures. She delighted in dressing and posing friends, relatives, and servants as the Virgin Mary, Queen Esther, or Shakespeare’s faithful Cordelia. Julia Jackson, Cameron’s niece, was one of the few female sitters who posed for the photographer as herself. Known as a great beauty throughout her life, she was a favorite subject for Cameron, who took dozens of photographs of her over the course of ten years. In April 1867, shortly before Jackson’s wedding to her first husband, Herbert Duckworth, Cameron made a series of head-on portraits of the young bride-to-be that alternately reveal Jackson as noble, tender, and vulnerable. In this photograph, made after the wedding, Cameron captured Jackson’s mature beauty and extraordinary strength.
| Title | Mrs. Herbert Duckworth |
|---|---|
| Artist | Julia Margaret Cameron |
| Date | April 1867 |
| Medium | Albumen print |
| Style | 19th century |
| Dimensions | 34.2 × 26.3 cm (13 1/2 × 10 3/8 in.) |
About Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron is known for painterly photographic portraits of some of the most celebrated figures in Victorian England and for staged allegorical images drawn from poetry, literature, and the Bible. She began photographing in the 1860s at the age of forty-eight, after being given a camera by her daughter and son-in-law. “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied,” she wrote in “Annals of My Glass House,” an autobiographical essay.
Cameron exhibited during her lifetime, but she became better known after her death when her works were championed (and reprinted) by Alfred Stieglitz and his fellow Pictorialist photographers. Stieglitz published Cameron’s photographs alongside his own and wrote that she was “one of photography’s few ‘classics.’” Cameron’s photography was further celebrated in a 1926 book, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, which featured an introduction by her great-niece, the writer Virginia Woolf.
In 1949 Stieglitz donated nine prints of works by Cameron to the Art Institute, including portraits of poets Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin. Later acquisitions ranged from exquisite single images to a trove of prints sold to the museum by the Cameron family on the occasion of the 1998 exhibition, Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women. This show underscored the range of Cameron’s female portraits—variously defiant, forthright, melancholy, or languidly sensual—and celebrated her role as a visionary practitioner.