Julia Margaret Cameron has long been recognized as one of the greatest portrait photographers. Early critical discussion of her work centered on portraits of men who comprised her Victorian circle of intellectual friends, including the evolution theorist Charles Darwin, the social critic Thomas Carlyle and the poet Alfred Tennyson. The Art Institute of Chicago offered a new perspective with the 1998-1999 travelling exhibition Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women. In the introductory essay for the exhibition catalogue, Sylvia Wolf points out that, “It is in her portraits of women that she gave herself the most room for artistic experimentation and that she displays the greatest range.” And that Cameron’s pioneering portraits - precursors to a great line of portraiture by women photographers in the 20th century - “reflect the questioning of identity that is a defining characteristic of the modern era.”

By using gentle lighting, soft focus and long exposures, Cameron created images that breathe with life. Cameron’s favorite model and her most photographed subject was her niece Julia Jackson: a Pre-Raphaelite beauty and mother of the writer Virginia Woolf and artist Vanessa Bell. Cameron took My Favourite Picture, 1867 (lot 7) the year of her niece’s marriage to the barrister Herbert Duckworth. Head slightly bowed and dressed in a costume by Cameron that evokes England’s legendary past, Cameron presents the young Julia as a Madonna-like saint. In 1874, a year before moving to Ceylon where Cameron would live out her final years, she took one of her last photographs of Julia: She walks in beauty (lot 11). No longer an embodiment of ideal, virginal youth, Cameron’s muse is now a stylishly dressed woman, transfixed by her brilliant aunt’s lens.