Hardinge Hay Cameron

In his influential 1859 publications Self-Help, Samuel Smiles described the home as “the very nucleus of national character; and from that source . . . issue the habits, principles and maxims, which govern public as well as private life.” For Julia Margaret Cameron, family life formed the cornerstone of her art. Her five sons were all pressed into service before the camera and often helped in practical matters. Describing her earliest experiments in her Annals, Cameron remarked: “Hardinge, being on his Oxford vacation, helped me in the difficulty of focussing,” practical advice that contributed to her “first success” with Annie (see 84.XZ.186.69).

In this 1864 portrait, Hardinge (1846-1911), Cameron’s third son, is presented in the guise of an artist. The style of presentation is Titianesque—the lighting is somber and moody, creating the very faintest of modeling in the skin tones, so that the subject’s facial features are clothed in a subdued, painterly chiaroscuro. The practice of dressing up and assuming a role was familiar to the Cameron children on account of the elaborate amateur theatricals that took place in their house, Dimbola, and at Farringford, the home of the neighboring Tennysons. Cameron has taken this role playing a step further and ennobled it with the camera, combining in pictorial form the real and ideal.

The mannerism of this portrait resembles the work of the photographer David Wilkie Wynfield. He was known for his “fancy portraits” of artist friends dressed in costume as characters from English history. These pictures fall somewhere between portraiture and genre and were made with the lens placed slightly out of focus in order to suggests the softer outlines of a painting. Cameron received some instructions from Wynfield, and their work was compared in the photographic and fine art press in 1864 and 1865. In a letter written to William Michael Rossetti on January 23, 1866, Cameron acknowledged Wynfield’s influence: “To my feeling about his beautiful Photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success.”

Julian Cox. Julia Margaret Cameron, In Focus: From the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 16. ©1996 The J. Paul Getty Museum.