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Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden: Photographs 1863.
(The image above left is possibly a self-portrait). Hawarden was a notable amateur photographer who
exhibited at the Photographic Society in 1863, where her work was commended for its ‘artistic
excellence’ and composition. The balance between ‘amateur’ and professional at this time were
extremely flexible - Hawarden is known to have made commissioned portraits of childhood friends of
Charles Dodgson, while her near-contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, although she regularly |(if
intermittently) had commissions, was driven by her own artistic aspiration, and did not wish to
become a ‘professional photographer’. Hawarden mostly photographed her family - her daughters
Clementina, Florence Elizabeth and Isabella Grace, and it is in these portraits, with their revelation of
pubertal feminine introspection, a state of coming of age dreamlike reverie that Hawarden captures
so well, seemingly completely empathic to the dawning aesthetic sensibility marked by the Rational
Dress Movement, and the pre-Raphaelite painters and their models, lovers and wives. Cementina,
Lady Hawarden died age 43 in 1865, (just a year after Julia Margaret Cameron was given her own
camera). Hawarden’s work (mostly in the form of albumen prints from Wet -Collodion glass plates) is
better known now in the 21st century. Some 750 photographs - mostly prints cut from old family
photo-albums - were donated by the Hawarden family to the V&A Museum in 1939 https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Clementina_Maude,_Viscountess_Hawarden
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.