Stunning Early Portrait Photography From the Victorian Era by Julia Margaret Cameron

British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) has been described as one of the Finest portraitists of the nineteenth century-in any medium. Raised in a well-connected and creative family, Cameron led an unconventional life for a woman of the Victorian age. After devoting herself to an artistic and literary salon at her home on the Isle of Wight and raising eleven children, Cameron took up photography in her late forties.

Over the next fourteen years, she produced more than a thousand strikingly original and often controversial images. Her searching portraits of her friends and acquaintances, including Alfred Tennyson and Charles Darwin, have been called the world's first close-ups.

May Day, 1866

Circe, 1865

The Five Foolish Virgins, 1864

Il Penseroso, 1864–1865

Long-Suffering, Gentleness, Goodness

Summer Days, 1866

Sappho, 1865

The Passing Of Arthur, 1875. From Illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and Other Poems, Volume II.

Kate Dore, C. 1862

Paul and Virginia, 1864

Mrs. Herbert Duckworth, 1872

Annie; ‘My first success,’ 1864

Lady Adelaide Talbot, May 1865

Lady Adelaide Talbot, May 1865

Christiana Fraser-Tytler, c. 1864-1865

Sappho, 1865

Christabel, 1866

Beatrice 1866

Julia Jackson 1867

Hosanna 1865

Portrait of Julia Margaret Cameron by her son, about 1870

Vivien and Merlin from Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, 1874

Lady Elcho / A Dantesque Vision, 1865

Resting in Hope; La Madonna Riposata, 1864

St. Agnes, 1864

The Dream, 1869

Henry Taylor, October 10, 1867

Charles Darwin, 1868

Portrait of Herschel, April 1867

Henry Cole, 1868