Page 29 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 29/146
I especially like her work - Hawarden eschews the kind of proto-Pictorialist experimentation of Julia
Margaret Cameron, restricting her aesthetic palette to capturing the moods, the beauty, and the
reveries of her daughters. There’s a peace, a quiet contemplative meditation that her work evokes,
an appreciation of the aesthetic composition that the Photographic Society applauded. They remind
me of Alain Fournier’s beautiful novel Le Grand Meaulnes, or Debussy’s La Mer or Prelude a
l'apres-midi d'un faune, Elgar’s Enigma Variations and of course of James McNeill Whistler: The
White Girl (1862), and Julia Margaret Cameron: Pre-Raphaelite Study 1870. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementina_Maude,_Viscountess_Hawarden
Julia Margaret Cameron: Sadness (Ellen Terry) 1864 + George Frederic Watts: Choosing (Ellen Terry) 1864.
Watts was a very famous and popular Victorian painter. He married the 16-year-old up and coming Shakespearean actress and proto-feminist Ellen Terry in 1864, and they honeymooned at Julia Mar- garet Cameron’s home-cum-studio-cum-salon at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight. The marriage didn’t last very long. Ellen went back to the stage, becoming as famous as her near contemporary
Sarah Bernhardt.
http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/58960/julia-margaret-cameron-ellen-terry-at-age-sixteen-british-negative-1864-print- about-1875/
The beautiful Ellen Terry was just 16 years old when she posed for these two leading artists of the 19th century: George Frederick Watts - the 47 year old famous painter, and his contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron - the wildly eccentric saloniere, who was just discovering the joys of the art and technics of photography - she had been given a sliding-box camera for Christmas the previous year. The tender insights that both artists bring to their subject accentuate Ellen’s youth - the al- most child-like Terry of the painted portrait and the very feminine empathy that Cameron brings to the photographic portrait. Although she didn’t have her own camera until 1864, Julia Margaret Cameron is one of the earliest female practitioners - and she was no stranger to the new art. En route to India aged 15, she had met and become life-long friends with John Herschel - the poly- mathic scientist - and it was Herschel who not only discovered the solution to ‘fixing’ a photograph- ic image, but in 1839 actually coined the word ‘photography’. Cameron had had lessons in compos- ition, the wet-collodion process and albumen printing from photographers David Wilkie Wynfield and Oscar Gustave Rejlander - perhaps even collaborating (in modern parlance ‘art directing’) with Rejlander on a portrait of Tennyson and his family made in the grounds of Farringford in 1862. Cameron went on to establish herself as an important artistic-photographer, famous for her soft-fo- cus pictorialism.
I live next door to Dimbola - Julia Margaret Cameron’s home and studio - named after their tea es- tate in Sri Lanka, and so have taken a very special interest in the history of Cameron and her and Tennyson’s ‘Freshwater Circle’. Indeed it still seems to be a privilege to be living inTerrace Lane