Julia Margaret Cameron - Photographs from the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago New York Wednesday, October 1, 2014 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia Woolf), by inheritance, 1941
    Margery Hamill and Frances Barker, Chicago, 1950s
    Purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago, 1970

  • Literature

    The Art Institute of Chicago, The Intuitive Eye: Photographs from the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Collection, pl. 33 there titled Saint Julia
    Cox and Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, pl. 302
    Wolf, Julia Margaret Cameron's Women, pl. 56

  • Catalogue Essay

    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.

7

My Favourite Picture of all my works, My niece Julia (Jackson)

1867
Albumen print.
10 3/4 x 8 3/8 in. (27.3 x 21.3 cm)
Signed, dated, annotated 'From Life' and 'Registered Photograph' in ink on the mount; 'The Art Institute of Chicago' collection label affixed to the reverse of the mat.

Estimate
$10,000 - 15,000 

Sold for $11,250

Contact Specialist
Vanessa Kramer Hallett
Worldwide Head, Photographs
vhallett@phillips.com

Caroline Deck
Head of Sale
cdeck@phillips.com

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Photographs from the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

New York Auction 1 October