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Julia Margaret Cameron

Her trademark fuzziness can make figures look as though breath were in the air around them, and when she is suddenly...

Cameron created a pantheon of hairy brainboxes, boasting that ‘the greatest men of the age … say I have immortalised them.’ The adored face of Henry Taylor – whether photographed as himself, or as King Ahasuerus or Prospero – rests on his luxuriant beard like an afterthought; Joseph Hooker, one of her most keenly defined portraits, looks as if he is trying to escape his whiskers. Without the aureole of greatness, and with no recorded complaints, Cameron’s female sitters – heads tilted, eyes cast down, in semi-profile – often seem to be melting away, into melancholy or into someone else: ‘The Lily Maid of Astolat’, Alethea, ‘Il Penseroso’. As with other proposed links – both worked for a decade and a half or less, both started their careers when given cameras by family members, neither was celebrated during their lifetime, both were fascinated by Greek sculpture and umbrellas (oh, and both were women) – the correspondence is more mechanical than illuminating.

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