Julia Jackson

Cameron was especially drawn to photographing the leading men of the period but she also had a range of favourite female sitters. This portrait of Julia Jackson, Cameron’s niece and godchild, was taken three years before she married her first husband, Herbert Duckworth, at the age of nineteen. He was sixty-six and died only three years later. She later married Leslie Stephen, a writer and critic, and two of their daughters were the painter Vanessa Bell and the author Virginia Woolf.

Cameron loved to photograph the young Jackson, taking her first portrait in 1864 and the last ten years later. Her well-defined features and distinctive bone structure inspired Cameron who experimented with lighting her face in various ways. This is one of several photographs she made at the same sitting in which she focuses our attention on the attenuated and taut neck of her sitter, leaving most of her features in shadow. Jackson was also the only woman that Cameron did not require to appear in costume at some point: it appears that her enigmatic and strong face alone was sufficient to fascinate the photographer.

Cameron was especially inspired by portraiture and created some of the period’s most poetic and physiologically intense portraits. As she wrote some two years after she took this portrait:

I have been just engaged in doing ... a series of Life sized heads – They are not only From the Life but to the Life and startle the eye with wonder & delight. I hope they will astound the Public & reveal more of the mystery of this heaven & our art – They lose nothing in beauty & gain much in power. (Julia Margaret Cameron, 1866 in Isobel Crombie, Re-View: 170 years of photography, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p.34).

Text © National Gallery of Victoria, Australia