page_title: Julia Margaret Cameron
section_title: Mid-career
hierarchical_section_title: Julia Margaret Cameron / Biography / Photography career / Mid-career
caption_attribution_description: English: The Kiss of Peace, albumen print, 36.0 x 27.8 cm.
context_page_description: Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. She also produced sensitive portraits of women and children.
  After establishing herself first among Calcutta's Anglo-Indian upper-class and then among London's cultural elite, Cameron formed her own salon frequented by distinguished Victorians at the seaside village of Freshwater, Isle of Wight.
  After showing a keen interest in photography for many years, Cameron took up the practice at the relatively late age of 48, after her daughter gave her a camera as a present. She quickly produced a large body of work capturing the genius, beauty, and innocence of the men, women, and children who visited her studio at Freshwater, and created unique allegorical images inspired by tableaux vivants, theatre, 15th-century Italian painters, and the work of her creative contemporaries. Her photography career was short but productive; she made around 900 photographs over a 12-year period.
context_section_description: In 1865, she became a member of the Photographic Society of Scotland and arranged to have her prints sold through the London dealers P. & D. Colnaghi. She presented a series of photographs, The Fruits of the Spirit, to the British Museum, and held her first solo exhibition in November 1865. Her prints generated robust demand and she showed her work throughout Europe, securing awards in Berlin in 1865 and 1866, and an honourable mention in Dublin.
  Her photographic activity was supported by her husband. Cameron wrote: "My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause."
  In August 1865, the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, purchased 80 of her photographs. Three years later, the museum offered her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, essentially making her the museum's first artist-in-residence.
  
  She produced images of Thomas Carlyle and John Herschel in 1867. By 1868, she was generating sales through P. & D. Colnaghi and a second London agent, William Spooner. In 1869, she created The Kiss of Peace, which she considered her finest work.
  In the early 1870s, Cameron's work matured. Her elaborate illustrative tableauxs involving religious, literary, and classical figures peaked in a series of images for Tennyson's Idylls of the King, published in 1874 and 1875, evidently at her expense. During this time, she also wrote Annals of my Glass House, an unfinished memoir recounting her photographic career.
caption: The Kiss of Peace, by Julia Margaret Cameron.
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