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Julia Margaret Cameron

Born: Calcutta, 11 June 1815
Died: Dikoya, Valley, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), 26 January 1879
Nationality: English
Background: 

father was an official in the East India Company

Career: 

1838 – marries lawyer Charles Hay Cameron

1847 – publishes translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s Leonora

1848 – settles in London; attends literary/artistic salon of her sister, Sara Prinsep, at Little Holland House

1865 - exhibits at International Exhibition in Dublin, receives honorable mention; one-person exhibitions at French Gallery and Colnaghi Gallery (both London)

1867 - exhibits at Exposition universelle, receives honorable mention

1869 - exhibits at Photography Exhibition in Groningen (The Netherlands), receives bronze medal

1873 - exhibits at Vienna World's Fair
 
Member of photographic societies in London and Scotland. Sold her work through Colnaghi & Company, a London print-seller

1875 – family moves to Ceylon to oversee coffee plantation

Important Artworks: 

The Day Spring [Madonna], c. 1865 (George Eastman House, Rochester)

Mrs Herbert Duckworth, 1867 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

The Kiss of Peace, 1868 (University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City)

 

In a 31 December 1864 letter to John Herschel, Cameron described her artistic goal:

My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry & beauty.
                   
Cameron, Julia Margaret. Letter to John Herschel, 31 December 1864. Reprinted in Ford, Colin. The Cameron Collection: An Album of Photographs By Julia Margaret Cameron Presented to Sir John Herschel. Wokingham: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Limited. 1975, p. 141.

Web Resources

Metmuseum: Julia Cameron