Prospero

In the same month that she created her commanding portrait of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (see 84.XZ.186.1), Julia Margaret Cameron photographed the poet Henry Taylor (1800-1886) as Prospero, the duke of Milan in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Cameron and Taylor met in 1848 and were neighbors in Kent and later in London. He visited Freshwater for a couple of weeks each spring and autumn; in his Autobiography (1885) he described the Cameron household as an environment where “conventionalities had no place.” Taylor was an important model for Cameron and a willing accomplice in some of her more extravagant pictorial and narrative explorations with the camera. Sometimes he was photographed as himself; at other times he was presented as the Kings Ahasuerus, David, and Lear, as well as the artist Rembrandt. Together with Tennyson, Taylor is the most frequently cited name in the copyright records for Cameron’s photographs at Stationer’s Hall, suggesting that she had high prospects for the commercial sale of his image.

Shakespeare’s Prospero is a mercurial scholar who learns the secret powers of nature after many years of laborious study. Cameron depicts the character as a sage-like figure with an arresting appearance. Taylor’s head entirely fills the frame; Cameron underscores the realism of his portrait in proportion and personality by inscribing the mount of the print with the word “Life.” The head is bathed in a shimmering, effervescent light that imparts a liquid quality to the sitter’s eyes. The combination of patristic beard and artistic dress cap produces a powerful image of male authority. In the journal Sun Artists (1890), Peter Henry Emerson described the picture as “one of her earliest works and one of the best. Recalls Leonardo da Vinci in its elaboration, lighting and sentiment. A great work in many ways.”

Julian Cox. Julia Margaret Cameron, In Focus: From the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 44. ©1996 The J. Paul Getty Museum.