Jul 6, 2026, 10:39 PM

What was remarkable to photographer Julia Margaret Cameron about her early work? The speed of production.

In 1864 Cameron wrote this about her first portrait: Here's "my first perfect success in this complete[d] photograph … taken by me at 1 p.m. Friday Jan. 29th. Printed, toned, fixed and framed all by me & given as it is now by 8 p.m. this same day."

Cameron's portraits captured famous Victorians in soft focus—Lord Tennyson, Ellen Terry, Charles Darwin, John Hersche, Alice Lidell, Henry Wadsworth. But critics ridiculed her use of the supposedly truthful medium—photography—to depict imaginary subjects. Her scenes from mythology, Christianity, and literature were inspired by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare.

V&A forerunner, the South Kensington museum, collected and showed her work as pictures in their own right.

Here's one of Cameron's 900 photos, from 1865, depicting the bard's Prospero and Miranda.

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A carbon print, Victorian style photograph from 1865 by Julia Margaret Cameron, titled "Prospero and Miranda". The photo depicts characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Standing is Prospero, an older bearded man (modelled by Henry Taylor), wearing a velvet hat and holding a staff in ome hand. Kneeling at his knees is Miranda, a long-haired young woman (Mary Ryan), in a voluminous gown with large sleeves and a full skirt.

The photo is about 45×35 centimeters (about 18×14 inches).

On the Isle of Wight, in a chicken coop converted to a studio, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) made photographs that were rule-breaking: purposely out of focus, and often including scratches, smudges, and other traces of the artist’s process. This image shows a few of such marks. She often posed her friends, family, neighbours, and servants as characters from biblical, historical, or allegorical stories.

See this or photos like it in the V&A's South Kensington site, in the Prints and Drawings room.

Accession nunber RPS.762-2017.

Photo: V&A Museum.