page_title: Julia Margaret Cameron
section_title: South Africa and Calcutta
hierarchical_section_title: Julia Margaret Cameron / Biography / Marriage and social life / South Africa and Calcutta
caption_attribution_description: Drawing (detail). Collection Sven Gahlin, London.
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 1835, after suffering several illnesses, Julia visited the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa with her parents to recover. It was common for Europeans living in India to visit South Africa to convalesce after an illness.
  While there, she met the British astronomer and photochemist Sir John Herschel, who was observing the southern celestial hemisphere. She also met Charles Hay Cameron, twenty years her senior and a reformer of Indian law and education who later invested in coffee plantations in what is now Sri Lanka. Charles Hay was also there to convalesce, likely from a virulent malarial fever which often spread during the Indian monsoon season. The illness he suffered caused recurring kidney trouble and diarrhœa for the rest of his life.
  They were married in Calcutta on 1 February 1838, just two years after meeting. In December of that same year, Julia gave birth to their first child; Sir John Herschel was the godfather. Between 1839 and 1852, they had six children, one of whom was adopted. In all, the Camerons raised 11 children, five of her own, five orphaned children of relatives, and an Irish girl named Mary Ryan whom they found begging on Putney Heath and whom Cameron used as a model in her photographs. Their son, Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, would also become a photographer.
  Through the early 1840s—as the organiser of social engagements for the Governor-General, Lord Hardinge—Cameron became a prominent hostess in Anglo-Indian society. During this time she also corresponded with Herschel about the latest developments in photographic technology. In 1839, Herschel informed Cameron about the invention of photography. In 1842, he sent her two dozen calotypes and daguerreotypes, the first photographs she ever saw.
caption: A drawing of Julia Margaret Cameron by James Prinsep.
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