Julia Margaret Cameron
1869
Lionel Tennyson, Freshwater

Albumen silver print, from glass negative
24.5 x 30.4 cm (9 5/8 x 11 15/16 in.) (image)
 
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1941, Accession Number: 41.21.29
 
Curatorial description (Accessed: 21 Sept 2017)
Cameron's adventurous, sophisticated, and headstrong personality led her to take up photography in her fifties, and she persuaded friends and family to pose, including many of the period's intellectual and artistic luminaries: the scientists Charles Darwin and Sir John Herschel, the painter George Frederick Watts, and the poets Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who just happened to be her neighbor on the Isle of Wight. Unlike many of her contemporaries, whose images exploited the medium's natural veracity and abundance of detail, Cameron tempered those qualities with an evocative, chiaroscuro style, as in this contemplative portrait of Tennyson's twelve-year-old son, Lionel.
 
LL/77562