[Margaret and Adeline Norman]

In 1873 there was a marked downturn in Julia Margaret Cameron’s production. She made very few new photographs and registered just two images for copyright. She concentrated her energies on exhibitions, which included a large one-woman show in Hanover Square, London, and a representative selection of prints sent to the Universal Exhibition, Vienna. The lull in her activity was almost certainly the result of the death of her daughter Julia Norman (1838-1873), at age thirty-four. Already a mother of six (like Cameron), Norman went the way of Minnie Thackeray (84.XZ.186.100) and countless other women of the period and died in childbirth.

Because her looks were not considered fine enough, Norman was seldom a subject for her mother’s camera, a bitter irony in view of the fact that it was her gift of a camera that had been the catalyst for Cameron’s remarkable career in photography. Cameron’s grief at her death is expressed in a moving series of portraits that she made of the Norman family in the summer of 1874. In each there is a charged stoicism and solemnity in the close intertwining of their poses. This print and one other from the series were trimmed by Cameron into tondo shapes, further emphasizing the togetherness of the family (94.XM.31.5). A third print shows the two sisters enveloping their father in their arms (94.XM.31.3).

Adapted from Julian Cox. Julia Margaret Cameron, In Focus: From the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 92. ©1996 The J. Paul Getty Museum.