Wm. Holman Hunt

Julia Margaret Cameron was described by many of her friends and contemporaries as a lionizer, always searching for important artists and writers to place before her camera. She had intimate access to many of the most influential people in Victorian society and relished the opportunity of photographing them. Cameron also enjoyed the challenge of the confrontation—securing a likeness and demonstrating her ability to draw out the emotional and psychological characteristics of her sitters.

By the spring of 1864 Cameron was sufficiently intrepid to begin transporting her camera equipment from the Isle of Wight to London. It was at Little Holland House that she first met William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one of the leading painters of the day. Hunt’s works, much admired by the Victorian public, were widely reproduced as engravings and published in art magazines. He was drawn to the exoticism of the Middle East and traveled there widely in the 1850s and 1860s. In June 1854 in Jerusalem he began The Finding of the Savior in the Temple (now at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK), which secured his reputation as the religious painter of his age.

When Cameron photographed Hunt, she presented him as the painter of the Holy Land, in an informal studio setting with a dark curtain serving as a backdrop. He sports an elegant headdress and striped robe with a stylish waistband. This portrait, which is inscribed “Lawn at Hendon,” is one of at least two negatives from a sitting that took place at the home of Cameron’s invalid sister, Maria (“Mia”) Jackson (1818-1892). In a letter to a friend written in June 1864, Hunt commented rather indifferently: “I can’t say I took interest enough in my own face to look at the portrait very closely, but my impression certainly was that it made my face less ugly than I was accustomed to see it in the glass.”