Prints and Authors in the Time of Manet

Mrs. Herbert Duckworth (Julia Jackson) with the Fisher Children at Saxonbury

Albumen print, 1872
Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1985.30

By all accounts Julia Margaret Cameron was a very persuasive woman able to convince even passing acquaintances to pose for her literary themed photographs. Cameron received her first camera as a gift when she was 48 years old. Having the means to humor her new pastime, she built her own studio and photography lab on her property at Freshwater on the Isle of Wright. She had the good fortune to associate with the leading intellectuals and artists of the day and photographed many, including the painter George Frederick Watts, astronomer Sir John Hershel, and Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
The woman in this photograph is Julia Prinsep Jackson, the daughter of Cameron’s sister Maria (Mia). Julia Jackson married Herbert Duckworth in 1867, and eight years after his death in 1870, she married Sir Leslie Stephen. Writer Virginia Wolfe and artist Vanessa Bell were the daughters of her second marriage.