May du Maurier de Cameron, Julia Margaret - September 1874

"Albumen print, original mount. 34 x 27.5 cm. Inscribed and signed on the mount by Cameron: "From life, registered photograph, copy right, Julia Margaret Cameron, Freshwater, Sep. 1874." Very good condition. This is an unrecorded portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron, the foremost British portrait photographer of her time. "How masterly … are her straightforward, truthful portraits, which are entirely free from false sentiment." "It is they which have made her work immortal in the annals of photography" (Gernsheim). "After receiving a camera as a gift, Julia Margaret Cameron began her career in photography at the age of forty-eight. She produced the majority of her work from her home at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. By the coercive force of her eccentric personality, she enlisted everyone around her as models, from family members to domestic servants and local residents. The wife of a retired jurist, Cameron moved in the highest circles of society in Victorian England. She photographed the intellectuals and leaders within her circle of family and friends, among them the portrait painter George Frederick Watts, the astronomer Sir John Herschel, and the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She derived much of her subject inspiration from literature, and her work in turn influenced writers" (Getty Museum) Cameron declared that "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty." In September 1874 illustrator and novelist George Du Maurier, his wife, and his daughter May came to Cameron's home at the village of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight and sat for portraits. This image is unrecorded in Cox and Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, which lists four portraits from the occasion (nos. 213-215 and 940). Cameron quotes Du Maurier as saying that her photography "charms me." Provenance: George du Maurier, and by descent.".