[Thomas Carlyle]

In an 1866 review of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work published in Macmillan’s Magazine, Conventry Patmore remarked: “Her position in literary and aristocratic society gives her the pick of the most beautiful and intellectual heads in the world. Other photographers have had to take such subjects as they could get.” In the spring of 1867 Cameron landed the opportunity to photograph the historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) at Little Holland House. Two negatives were made on the occasion: this frontal monumental head and a profile study (https://collections.vam.ac.uk).

The Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt remarked that Carlyle’s face, “despite a shade of rickety joylessness, was one of the noblest I had ever seen.” Indeed, its sculptural quality prompted Cameron to inscribe some prints with the caption “Carlyle like a rough block of Michelangelo’s sculpture.” The author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) was, for Cameron, a hero himself, whose convictions regarding the immanence of the deity and a providential order working through natural leaders were entirely in keeping with her own. Carlyle’s writings were opinionated and highly intuitive and stirred readers by antagonism rather than sympathy. He posed awkward, provocative questions and told the truth about the condition of society in clear-sighted, often scathing discourses. Yet for all his tremendous critical and analytical powers, Carlyle’s weakness was his inability to suggest or supply solutions. Anna Jameson described him with great acuity in her Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, Fancies (1854): “He is a man who carries his bright intellect as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees only the subjects on which he chooses to throw that blaze of light; those he sees vividly, but, as it were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near, are dark, because perversely he will not throw the light of his mind upon them.”

Julian Cox. Julia Margaret Cameron, In Focus: From the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996), 62. ©1996 The J. Paul Getty Museum.