← Empire: World History
Empire: World History
321. Exploding Rum-filled Coffins, Anglo-Indian Sisterhood, & Julia Margaret Cameron
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Hello and welcome to Empire. I'm afraid it's just me without Anita because she is resting after her terrible week in A and E for which she's now recovered. But she had a miserable time and I'm glad to say she'll be back with us next week for our Indian Mutiny Our 1857 Great Uprising Series which starts next week. In her absence I thought I could get away with smuggling in one more relative into the pod cause she's not here to stop me and I have a free hand. So today will be the final episode of our Photographers who documented the Eyes on Empire miniseries that we've been doing. And I felt we couldn't allow that to pass without taking the opportunity to talk about my great aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. Now to traverse her life, we are joined by the wonderful art historian and my friend Emily Burns, who has just edited the fantastic book Women of the Patel Sisters, which accompanies the brilliant new exhibition at the Watts Gallery near Guildford, which has just opened and which we recommend that you definitely go and visit. It's a wonderful, wonderful gallery set in this beautiful and unexpectedly rural valley just down from Hogsback with the wonderful Watts Chapel and as well as the gallery. So it's an extraordinary place to go and visit. If you don't know it, now is the time to discover it. If you do know it, come and see the new exhibition which will dazzle you. And it's all. Well, it was kicked off certainly by Emily, who was the initial conceiver of the exhibition, has edited the wonderful catalogue. Welcome Emily. And the exhibition is doing well. It's all sort of chugging along now. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
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C
Yeah, it's doing very well. It's open until the 4th of May, so plenty of time to come and see.
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A
I am Coming back specially in the new year. Wonderful to do swoop and see it. But introduce us Emily, for those who I grew up with Judy Mark Cameron in the house and we had her photographs and it was something we were always very proud of. But for those who've never heard of this woman, give us just a kind of, you know, a sketch about why she's worth listening for the next 40 minutes to.
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C
Yeah, she's a really interesting person because she's one of the seven sisters who are so interesting and she's the one who. She's not necessarily a household name but among artists and photographers she certainly is and she should be more famous because she's a pioneer of photography the very early beginnings of photography. She was gifted camera late in life and really took to it like a duck to water at the age of.
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A
48 she started incredibly late.
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C
Yes. And you know, given gifted by her, her daughter and son in law and you know it was a sliding box camera, one of the very early sorts. She, she had you know, a friend, Herschel who, who was a photochemist and she knew a little bit about.
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A
He was rather a sort of distinguished old Victorian gent in his own right.
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C
Yeah. So she knew a bit about, you know, about the science behind it and how to do it but you know, she essentially was self taught so it's an incredible feat that over such a short period of time and being entirely self taught she could sort of rise up to be one of the most important 19th century, full stop really in any medium.
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A
There's a nice quote by Roger Fry which makes that point. Roger Fry, writing at the beginning of the 20th century said Mrs. Cameron's photographs already bid fair to outlive the works of the artists who work at her contemporaries, which is very nice.
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C
Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah. I mean she was. There was a brief period when she wasn't so well known but really since her Virginia Woolf and Fry and from then on really, you know, she's been really appreciated for what it's worth because she really did such beautiful creative photographs which it's sort of prescient of the pictorialist tradition where sort of photography rather than being like a mechanical art was sort of brought up to the position of painting and sculpture and creating quite sort of romantic expressive artwork rather than just being a likeness.
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A
A cold. Yeah, I think many people who maybe don't know her name and they're thinking who is this person? If you just Google Julia Margaret Cameron photography you'll recognize many of the images because again like Karsh's images in the early 20th century or mid 20th century. Julia Margaret's Camerons are the defining photographs of many of the great figures of the 19th century. So, for example, Tennyson, when you come to think of Tennyson, we tend to think of her photograph now, the Dirty Monk photograph, as it was called at the time.
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C
Yeah, the Dirty Monk, which he quite liked, but he also refused to sit again. So it's quite an intense process, sitting for Cameron, as we'll probably discuss later. She was a character, that's for sure.
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A
She was a character. My favorite story about her and Tennyson was apparently, she was very keen that Tennyson get inoculated. And she arrived at his tower on the Isle of Wight and banged on the door and said, alfred, Alfred, you're a coward. Come down. And he did indeed meekly come down and agree to be inoculated. But whatever I got, it was smallpox. I don't know what it was.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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That was the kind of woman she was.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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So let's go back, Emily, to the stuff that I'm really interested in, which is her childhood and her sister's childhood in East India Company Calcutta. And these girls were partly Bengali, partly French. They stood out even at the time. And really that was the source of their considerable beauty, which is the first thing everyone noticed when they arrived in London. So Julia Margaret Cameron is born in Calcutta. She is the second eldest of the sisters, and she is born in June 1815.
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C
Yeah, yeah. I think they kind of played up to their Indian roots, their kind of Anglo Indian upbringing. And they, I think, because they had the French link as well, their grandmother Therese, you know, brought them up and educated them in Versailles. So they had, you know, they had their. Born in Calcutta, had time in France, but had English parents. You know, one French, one English parent, and, you know, they moved in the circles of the East India Company. They were very sort of cultured, if not educated in book learning academically. They were very kind of confident and, you know, well connected.
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A
And the book learning was very much from their mother's French side. They were educated in Versailles because their father was this notorious scallywag who I am longing to tell a story which may be familiar with, but it's a story which is only partially true, but it's still worth telling all the same. It's Virginia Woolf's story. And when she was reintroducing Julia Margaret Cameron, her great aunt, in the 1920s, she starts with the story, and it's the story of how James Pattle, who was Julia Margaret Cameron's father, who was a notorious scallywag and a drinker and known as the biggest liar in India, who claimed to have sailed across Atlantic in a hen coop and was also known as Jem Blazes, the biggest liar in India. Anyway, this character made a fortune importing ice from America to Calcutta and spent it all on a considerable wine cellar and then sort of more or less drank himself to death. And in the end, appropriately enough, he asked to be shipped back to London in a barrel of rum, which was then the favored way. Lord Nelson and Byron and several other characters who died away from their preferred graves were indeed in this period put into barrels of rum. It wasn't that unusual, but the story goes that the barrel of rum plus battle were put into the widow's bedroom and then the boat that was meant to take him back to England didn't arrive. And this was the heat of the Calcutta summer and it got hotter and hotter and the boat didn't come and didn't come. And then one night the widow was sleeping when suddenly there was a terrific explosion and Pattle burst out of his rum barrel. Whereupon, according to Virginia Woolf, the widow then died too. They were both nailed down and put into the boat together, which had then turned up finally. But the sailors realized that there was rum in this, so they bored a hole, allegedly in the barrels desperation and then began drinking the rum. And then the. The pilot drank so much that he steered the ship onto a sandbank in the Hooghly. The paraffin lamp which was being used to light this nefarious activity, crashed to the ground, the rum ignited and the whole thing exploded. So Patel never made it back to England, according to this story at least, but was cremated in the Hoogley. The trouble is, there is a perfectly good grave for him in South London. So certain parts of the story clearly aren't true.
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C
Yeah, it seems Virginia Woolf ascribed to the ethos of don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
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A
I've always believed that myself. Anyway, so the girls make it back to England, or certainly to Europe, and some of them are educated in Versailles with Granny, and they become known both in London and in Calcutta for their beauty. So despite Patel being this ruffian, their grandmother, who called them all to Versailles successively and had them shipped out for a proper French education, made sure that they grew up with the very best that French education could offer. And they became renowned for their enthusiasms, their beauty, their eccentricity and their charm. And Virginia Woolf wrote this wonderful paean to them. She said no one could restrain the Patels but themselves half French, half English, they were all excitable, unconventional, extreme in one form or another. All of a distinguished presence, tall, impressive and gifted, with a curious mixture of shrewdness and romance. No domestic detail was too small for their attention, no flight too fantastic for their daring. Not a bad start for an artistic career. Exactly.
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C
Yeah. I mean, it seems that they were, you know, they were sort of strong enough to hold their own amongst groups of big intellectuals and highly influential people. And, you know, Cameron published translation work and poetry. And Mary Watts once said that Sarah Patel, one of the sisters, was sort of complaining to her that she had no education. She kept saying. And then Mary Watts said, But she was riveted all the while by her power of vivid description and her originality of expression. So, you know, whatever education they had, it seems to have served them quite well in the world.
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A
And what's always intrigued me is that despite this being, you know, the height of Victorian racism, this is, you know, the period when Kipling is a young man, when attitudes are definitely not pro Indian or even interested in India the way that they had been in the 18th century. All of the sisters celebrated their Indianness, and they were known for wearing Indian clothes, chattering to each other in Hindustani. They sat on Indian rugs on the lawn serving Indian food. Their lobster curries were famous. And they wore sort of Kashmiri jam of our shawls that you see in their portraits, while all the rest of England was in busks and crinolines and whalebone corsets and all this sort of stuff. Should we be surprised at that? In this period that they made so much of their Indianness, I think it.
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C
Was, you know, they weren't the only Anglo Indians coming to London, but I think maybe the mixture of their upbringing, maybe it was a combination of the, you know, the personality of the father, their mother, grandmother, that upbringing they had, and their confidence, you know, they weren't ashamed of their background. And so they were used to wearing very comfortable flowing robes and Kashmiri sh. And, you know, and that's what they were used to.
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And bangles and all around their wrists.
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C
Yeah. And so they confidently wore. Wore them about town. And it suggested that this might be what influenced the Pre Raphaelite form of dress, that kind of bohemian, much looser style. And you can actually see in portraits of them by GF Watts. So at the Watts Gallery, in the Watts Gallery exhibition, you can see, you know, one of the most amazing portraits is this double portrait called the Sisters, showing Sophia, your great great grandmother, and Sarah stand in these beautiful flowing robes with their shawls. And you can see there, rakhi, the kinship bracelets on their wrists. And there's a second portrait also just of Sophia on her own in this beautiful white dress, again with a rakhi on her wrist. And you can see what they used to wear. It's quite nice to have that record of them.
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A
Let's quickly go through the different sisters because we've talked about them as a sisterhood. Take us through who they are because they're all quite interesting in their own way.
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C
Yeah. So Julia. Well, there originally were 10 children, but three were lost in infancy. So that left seven sisters. Julia was the second eldest of the seven sisters. Her older sister was Adeline, who was born in 1812 and named after their mother, who very sadly died at sea age 24. She married Lt. Gen. Colin McKenzie, who.
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A
Appears in my book Return of a King and who we dealt with in the pod about the 1842 retreat from Kabul. He's one of the captives and one of the few to survivors.
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C
Oh, okay. Yes, Well, a great link there. So he went on to be quite successful. But poor old Adeline died age 24, having got married at age 20, had three children in quick succession and then died at sea and was buried at sea. So she leaves the scene quite early in our story. But then the next one along after Julia was Sarah Patel, born in 1816, and she is a mother of the sort of second wave pre Raphaelite Val Princep. She married Henry Toby Princep, which maybe we can talk about because he's a very interesting figure.
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A
Princep Boys are very important, and I think people don't know about them much in England. They're very famous in India. Henry Toby Princep, who just mentioned who was Sarah's husband, was a Persian speaking Orientalist. He fights Macaulay, which is very topical in India today, where there's a big debate on this, saying that education should be in Indian languages and the Sanskrit should be venerated. Macaulay said a single shelf of a good English library is worth all the native literature of India and Arabia. And Prince that basically lost that battle. And then his brother is an even more famous figure in India today. James Princep, who decoded the Ashoka pillars, cracked the code to Karoshti in the Brahmi scripts, which basically opened up the whole of ancient Indian history. We now know, thanks to him, all about Ashoka and the Buddha and all these early Indian inscriptions. Could be read. And he went mad in the process of decoding it, but decoded it first and was then taken back in a sort of hospital ship and died, I think, on arrival in London. Third sister. So Mia, tell us about her.
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C
Mia was. She was born in 1818, and she became the grandmother of the author Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell of the Bloomsbury set. So that's kind of her claim to fame, in a way. She was born at sea. So it indicates how much the family spent traveling.
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A
They were kind of Victorian jet set. They were always on liners going back and forth.
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C
And it took a long time, I should add it. It used to take 90 days before the Suez Canal. And then by the end, you know, it could take about a month, you know, and a few weeks. But still, you know, at the beginning of their lives, certainly a very sizable chunk of their time was spent in quite dangerous transit. So Mia married Dr. John Jackson, and her daughter Julia Jackson, later Duckworth got married. Later Stephen married Leslie Stephen. So that was one of the main beautiful models of Julia Margaret Cameron.
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And the most famous really of her images are this extraordinary, haunting, heavy, luded face of Julia Jackson.
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And Julia Jackson was Julia Margaret Cameron's goddaughter. So they were particularly close. And, yeah, they took some beautiful photographs. And you can tell by this story so far that the family was very close. You know, all the children and grandchildren, they all sort of corresponded with each other. And, you know, I guess that happens when you are a sort of international network. Sometimes you're not with your children or not with your husband or not with your sisters. And so, I mean, especially Sarah Princep took on the role of supporting the younger siblings and their families and kind of sort of adopted the role of mother figure. Cause both their parents died, you know.
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A
And setting up this salon, Little Holland House, which was both the base for the family and all the cousins, as they successively arrived offliners or ships or whatever from India. But also, which is where the Watts Gallery comes in. She invited, famously, the painter Watts to come to lunch. And he stayed 35 years.
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C
Yeah, she said he came for three days, stayed for 30 years. And in fact, I think it was about 25. But, you know, whatever. Still quite a good line. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just shows how generous she was.
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Great grandmother lived. When she came from India. She moved in with her elder sister Sarah, where she succeeded to be sort of hit upon by various Pre Raphaelites, such as Burne, Jones and Rossetti, who all painted her endlessly, as well as Watts, who painted her these People were.
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C
Lurking around Little Holland House. You could meet a poet, you could meet a painter, you could meet, you know, Joachim the musician. And, you know, it was really quite an impressive place to whom the Halle Orchestra is named. That's it, that's it.
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Play in the garden in the evening soirees so all this went on and somewhere in the middle of this, later in the story, Julie Margaret turns up and makes everybody sort of dress up as King Arthur and takes their photograph leaning against a tree. Being the Knights of the Round Table or one of these sort of Walter Scott stories.
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C
Yeah, I mean, they called it sort of lion hunting in that, you know, there was a sort of. They were trying to collect these great people and try and photograph them. And, you know, Sarah wanted them to come to her soiree. Julia Margaret Cameron wanted to photograph them, Watts wanted to paint them. And so they did, most of them. I mean, I think Julia Margaret wanted to photograph Rossetti, and she never quite managed it, but, you know, she got most other people. She did quite well. She turned up, apparently. She turned up at the door with Henry Taylor. She turned up at the door of Carlisle. She was desperate to photograph him and his wife was horrified and had to sort of prevent her from walking into his room before his trousers were on.
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His wife was famously tough. She met her mother in Mrs. Carlisle.
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C
But she did get him. She did photograph him.
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And he's looking as if he's just been sort of caught with his trousers half up. And he described the photograph as an inferno because he looked so pissed off, that picture. Anyway, we've jumped ahead. Let's go back just before we go to the break to just give Julie Margret's life from when she comes back from Versailles. Having been educated, age 21, she gets sent off to the Cape of Good Hope. Tell us this story.
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C
Yes. So she got ill and so she was resting at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. And while she was there, she met two important people. One was Sir John Herschel, who he briefly already mentioned, the astronomer and photochemist. And they stayed in touch for the rest of their life. She photographed him. She fluffed up his hair for the portrait.
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A
Brilliant. She ruffled it just to make. Looks like Boris Johnson or something. It's a bad comparison because one just groans at Boris Johnson. But, yeah, yeah.
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C
So she. So she. They corresponded all their lives and, you know, so really I find it quite interesting that she was thinking and talking about photography well before, you know, well before she got her camera and started the art of photography herself. And so you can maybe say Sir John Herschel sort of planted the seed for that, which is quite nice. And then the other person she met was Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist, a reformer, 20 years her senior. And they married, they went back to Calcutta and married there in 1838. And you know, she adored Charles and he's also quite a character and there are some wonderful stories about her, you know, dressing him up in there's, you know, three layers of coats and a cone hat. He was pacing outside in the garden at Little Holland House and how he, you know, he looks like Merlin, but he was cast as Merlin, absolutely perfect casting in one of her photographs. And he had to sit next to this oak tree which they dragged onto the set and decorated and he kept getting fits of giggles and remember all the photographs through sort of vibrating the tree. I love it. But you know, he's a lovely relationship, both of them, I think.
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And he invests very early on in coffee plantations in Sri Lanka, which is going to be important for the end of the story because they always have these loss making plantations in Sri Lanka that are draining all their money. Money and to which they eventually retire because they can't afford to live in England.
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C
Yeah, yeah. I think Cameron, he, Mr. Cameron actually sort of, he really liked Sri Lanka salon and he wanted to go back there which is why they kind of returned at the end of their lives. But he, he wrote the sort of the legal code there. He was actually in the 1830s, he'd already been there and, and worked there. And so there was always a sort of link to it in the background. And you know, their sons went out and worked on the plantation. You know, he always joked that Julia with her great spending on people and gift giving was slicing up Ceylon as in their estates there another bit of salon gone, you know, another shawl.
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A
So listen, we must take a break now, but after this we want to come back and focus on Little Holland House, which we've mentioned already, but we want to dive deep into that world and Julia Margaret Cameron's amazing photography of the inhabitants of this Victorian salon.
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A
I think of it as a summer afternoon world. To my thinking, Little Holland House is an old white country house standing in a large garden, long windows open to the lawn. Through them come a string of ladies in crinolines and little straw hats. They are attended by gentlemen in peg top trousers and whiskers. Tea tables and great bowls of strawberries and cream are scattered about the lawn. They are presided over by the lovely sisters who do not wear crinolines but are robed in splendid Venetian draperies. They sit enthroned and talk with foreign emphatic gestures to the eminent men, rulers of India, statesmen, poets and painters. My mother comes out to the window wearing that striped silk dress buttoned at the throat that appears in her photographs by Julie Margaret. And there she stands, silent with her plate of strawberries, or perhaps is told to take a party across the lawn to Signor's studio. The sound of music also comes from those long low rooms where the great Watts pictures hang and Joachim playing the violin and also the sound of a voice reading poetry, Uncle Toby reading his translations from the Persian poets. So that is Virginia Woolf describing Little Holland House at its peak. Emily, tell us about Little Holland House because it's absolutely central to this story.
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C
Yeah, so Little Holland House was the Dower house of Holland House, which is now sadly under Melbury Road.
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A
So all that survives of this is of this whole world is sort of Leighton House, isn't it?
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C
Where you can go and get an.
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A
Image of what this used to feel like, I think.
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C
Yeah. So Little Holland House was demolished sadly as well. But it was this sort of rambling, sort of almost like a farmhouse type building. Big lawn, big gardens, big trees. And it's where Sarah Princep and Toby Princep settled in London, and they took in, you know, two of her younger sisters and their families and other families, you know, Julia would visit. She lived in East Sheen, and that's where they welcomed great artists, great poets. So George Frederick Watts, we've mentioned him already, he became a sort of artist in residence of sorts. And so that's why there's lots of wonderful.
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A
And all the sisters worshiped him and used to bring him tea and incense, as Georges Maurier says that. And worship them until his very manliness hath been undone.
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C
Yes. Hath departed. It's such a wonderful phrase. Yeah, yeah. So Watts was sort of held court there, but Rossetti went, Burne Jones went, and lots of politicians and scientists, Darwin, they had all these connections. And it was on a sort of Sunday afternoon, so a very kind of bohemian collection on an otherwise quite serious day. And they.
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A
Which in Victorian London was a big deal, so the Sabbath was celebrated very much as sort of something which should not be broken. And the sisters did break it. They had all their parties on that day.
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C
Yeah. And, you know, they served curries. They wore their fabulous outfits. You know, Julia would come in and try and persuade some unsuspecting person to sit for her portrait.
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A
There's a lovely story, one of my favorite stories, that she sees in the street outside Holland House. A handsome young priest, probably heading towards the Brompton Oratory, and without a moment's hesitation, goes up to him and says, you must be my Galahad. And the priest, understandably taken aback, murmurs, excuses, but she doesn't take no for an answer, ever. And assuming that his refusal of this honor to be in her photograph could only be for religious motives, she reassures him with the promise, I'll write and ask your Pope. And the priest in question afterwards, of course, becomes Cardinal Vaughan.
- [28:38]
C
Of course. Of course. But of course. Yeah. Another one of her close friends, Henry Taylor and his wife Alice, she attacks them with her wild, beaming benevolence, is the phrase. And she said to Taylor's new wife, Alice, that before the year is out, you will love me like a sister. And she did. She broke them down and they adored her. But there's lots of accounts of her sort of, you know, chasing after people to sit for her portraits, but also sort of showering people with gifts. And one friend commented that she would rain down precious things upon us, not drop by drop, but in whole conda mines at once. I know it.
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A
There's a kind of oddly classless atmosphere also in this place. They'd grown up Outside the English class Sister, which was such a dominant feature of Victorian society. And they unusually seemed to have broken through all that. So Watts came from a very humble background. Burne Jones came from sort of, you know, the back end of Birmingham. And none of these artists were from the top draw of society. And they took them in. And the photographs would often mix people like Tennyson, who was rather grand, with the cleaning lady from Little Holland House and the stray Italian waiter who became Iago in this, one of her most famous photographs. And she put them all together, quite irrespective, obeying none of the English laws of the class system. They'd all be jumbled together and made to sort of be the Knights of the Round Table or Sir Galahad and his ladies in some sort of Arthurian sort of scrub.
- [30:17]
C
Yeah, it was classless and intergenerational, which I think is the kind of wonderful environment to be in. You can learn a lot. Virginia Woolf said, we never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did anyone else.
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A
So let's talk about how she begins her photography, because she moves at one point to freshwater in the Isle of Wight, which is now a museum, which also can be visited to her. And all she did and has contained some of her cameras and many of her most famous pictures. And she knocks these two houses together. She's on the. She's not far. She's sort of walking distance from Tennyson, who's also taken refuge there. And she's always disturbing Tennyson when he's trying to compose his poems and telling him to be inoculated or delivers a grand piano or something of the sort, just when he's. The moment of inspiration has come. She's the eternal woman from Porlock, breaking into his reveries. But something very important happens, Emily, in December 1863. Tell us the whole story of the arrival of Charles Norman and the sliding box camera.
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C
Yes. Well, her daughter thought that she might be a bit lonely because Mr. Cameron was away in Ceylon checking on his plantations and seeing his sons, and she was. She was sort of not really sure what to do with herself. And so she took those presents that.
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Didn'T mean idleness in her sense, it meant saving the poor of Ireland. She raised more money than anyone else for the potato Famish famine.
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C
Yeah.
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Translating German poetry. I mean, every kind of strange enthusiasm was entertained. But anyway, this. This camera is delivered in 1863, and that becomes the entire focus for all her energy.
- [32:11]
C
Yes. And so sort of like she applied herself, like she applies herself to Everything else with great gusto and enthusiasm. And within a month she gets. Makes her first success, a photograph of a local girl, Annie Philpott. And she's so excited, she runs around giving her presents as if it was like the girl who had created the photo. And her first success sort of means the first image that she was happy with, that she hadn't accidentally ru by putting her finger on the back of the slide and got the exposure right. Because of course, you know, nowadays we think photography is very easy, but then at that stage it was a highly laboursome process, very laborious. You would have had to have used these big. Initially she had, I think it was 9 times 11 size glass plates and then it was 12 times 15 inch. So, I mean, really large heavy plates which you had to coat with solution. You had to, you know, take the photograph while still wet. You had to, you know, know then set it and wash it and clean it. All these sorts of layers to the making of a photograph. And she, you know, you had to do it in her Victorian dress. She was always covered in chemicals. Apparently her hands were stained and smelt of them. She smelt of them. And if you, apparently, if you walked past Dimbala at certain stages, you could get wafts of chemicals through the, through the bushes. But she, you know, she perfected the art and she got there and she. But what was interesting is that through all this experimentation, sure, she created sometimes sort of out of focus, maybe slightly more blurry or smudged images. And she worked out that actually she preferred that effect. It was more evocative and expressive and romantic. So she decided not to get higher focus. That was what she wanted.
- [33:54]
A
I've got a quote here by her son talking about this. He says, it is a mistake to suppose that my mother deliberately aimed at producing work slightly out of focus. What was looked for by her was to produce an artistic result, no matter what means she always acted according to her instinct. If the image of the sitter looked stronger, more charismatic, out of focus, she so reproduced it. But if she found the perfect clearness was desirable, she equally attained it.
- [34:21]
C
Yeah, she had a good eye. She knew, she knew what she was looking for when she saw it. And she'd go through, you know, she talks about going through a hundred glass plates to get one that she was happy with, that she'd then get, you know, get printed. We say, you know, she was an amateur or it was her hobby, but she, she, she approached it like a professional, even though she didn't actually have a professional setup. So her Dark room had been the coal. Yeah, it's her glass house with a chicken coop, and her dark room was a coal shed. And the dark room needed to have fresh running water, but it didn't. She just brought in cans of freezing water from outside to stick sort of slop onto the glass plates, you know, then that had to be sort of somehow collected and taken away. She didn't make it easy for herself, but she was happy making her photographs in the way that she did. And even though she could have made money as a commercial photographer, she got people writing petitions to her asking to be photographed by her. And there's this one lady who said, you know, I'm a carriage person, so I'll turn up and my skirts won't be crumpled. And she sent quite a terse reply saying. Saying, you know, I'm not that kind of photographer. I don't take commissions, and in any case, I'd prefer your skirt crumpled. She did it her way.
- [35:29]
A
She wrote her annals of my Glass House, which I should just read a couple of little quotes from, which talk at the end about her, how she began. She says, I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dart box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture. I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass. It is with effort that I restrain the overflow of my heart and simply state that my first lens was given to me by my cherished departed husband and daughter with the words, it may amuse you, Mother, to try photography when you are in your solitude. At Freshwater, I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length that longing has been satisfied.
- [36:16]
C
So wonderful.
- [36:16]
A
And that's what she was after. Beauty was something that actually mattered to her, didn't it?
- [36:20]
C
Yeah. And she photographed great men and great women as sort of portraits. And she also did what she called her fancy pictures, which were more literary, mythological, religious scenes, narrative scenes. And, you know, she took great pleasure in dressing up her subjects and getting them to pose and covering them with tinsel. Yes. Dressing them up and. Yeah, I mean, Tennyson called them her victims, of which he was one of which he was one. But the reason, I should probably say the reason that they joked about them being victims, it wasn't that meeting Julie Margaret Cameron, you know, she was a wonderful, charming lady. They had a good, fun time. The difficult bit was the exposure, because in those days you had to stay stock still for three to seven minutes, which, if you've ever tried to stay still with your eyes open for, you know, more than a minute, you realize how difficult that is. And that's why it was so sort of difficult and painful for them. And there's a really interesting account by someone who said, you know, by one minute I was screaming. By the second minute my eyes were about to pop out of my head. And by the end I broke down entirely and the photograph that resulted was full of wobbles. And she said, you know, if she wanted to catch this great queen in a state of great distress, then she was successful. But, you know, it was a difficult process. And that's also why I think there probably were quite a lot of photographs of her staff members and people who are close to her who are willing to do it a lot of times. And the more important, yeah, the celebrities, they'd say, okay, yeah, once. And then once they've done it once, they might not want to do it.
- [38:03]
A
And then you get that sort of furious picture, the inferno picture of Carlisle. It's just one, it's out of focus largely, and just this dark, brooding presence. But she's also, she's interesting because she's. On one hand, she's looking at Raphael, the Renaissance and the Old Masters and she's very, she's very good at her lighting. Her lighting is extraordinary. I mean, by any standards of any portrait painter. Comparing her work to Karsh or to, or to Annie Leibovitz or something, you can see that she's very much pulling the same sort of tricks that will be the key to successful portrait photography for centuries to come. But there's also quite a lot of sort of self conscious artistic work at hand in the radical cropping and these intense hazy close ups. She's really, I mean, she's really thinking about her photographs. It's not just a snap that, you know, may or may not work. There's a lot of thought going into everything, even leaving aside the narrative or the mythological or the religious symbolisms.
- [39:08]
C
Yes. And she was really keen to create kind of. She focused on rounded plastic forms. I think that's where the softer focus helped her. She felt it gave her subjects more weight using this sort of contrasting light and shade, the chiaroscuro. And she was also highly principled and she, she disapproved of retouching, unlike most other artists who would dot out spots in the print. And there's an interesting quote where she said, lastly, as to spots, they must, I think, remain. I could have them touched out, but I am the only photographer who always issues untouched photographs. And artists for this reason, amongst others, value my photographs. So Mr. Watts, Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Du Maurier write me above all others. And she was proud of that kind of principled take on photography that clearly the studio, commercial photographers would, you know, essentially airbrush their photographs and she didn't. And she'd send her prints, some of them to her gf. Watts used to be her sort of mentor as well as her friends, so she'd send her photographs to him for comment and advice.
- [40:10]
A
And he's often painting the same characters. Yes, we have, you know, you can put alongside her extraordinary pre Raphaelite looking photographs, his extraordinary portraits, which is many of which are still at the Wat. Scout.
- [40:25]
C
Yeah, I always think the one of Tennyson, actually her photograph of one of the front facing ones of Tennyson and the painting by Watts of Tennyson are very arrestingly similar. And I do wonder, you know, sometimes, did Watts receive her photographs before he painted the sitter and be influenced by that? Who knows? But he did. He was caring for her about. She didn't make much money from it. It was quite expensive process and she'd like to make money, but she didn't mind that she didn't as long as she made great art art. And he wrote to her, please do not send me valuable mounted copies. Send me any defective unmounted impressions. I shall be able to judge just as well and shall be just as much charmed with success and shall not feel that I'm taking money from you. So she was posting him all. All these defective works and that a lot of those are now in the V and A collection, actually, which is quite nice. There's lots of one off.
- [41:17]
A
She was a letter writer, wasn't she? Used to love the post. And in those days there were often four or five collections in four or five deliveries in the Victorian post. And Tennyson would record that he received, you know, 10 letters a day from her because he was obsessed with something, whether it was trying to get him inoculated or something else.
- [41:34]
C
Yeah. She once boasted that she wrote 99 letters in two weeks, in a fortnight. And then she said, you'll see why I have no leisure time. And also why she has so much energy, I suppose, to sort of put it into photography, you know, she was. But sadly, lots of her letters have been burnt because that was her instruction upon her death. So, you know, she wrote, my grandfather.
- [41:55]
A
Burnt a whole archive of Sophia's letters, which is a huge tragedy. My aunt saw him coming back grinning from the bonfire. Oh, gosh, I burnt the lot. There was a whole family scandal. The generation that followed. I had a gay great grandfather who in the eyes of my grandfather, was a disgrace to the family. So he just put the whole lot on a bonfire and it's all gone. But for which I would love to write all this at book length, but, no, there's just these fragments.
- [42:23]
C
I think it was more common then to. To destroy. It was kind of the. It was deemed as a respectful thing to do, to sort of destroy the letters if the person had asked and, you know. But she wrote to Henry Taylor every day and he wrote back. So how many letters are we missing with, you know, updates about her day and her thoughts and feelings Now, Emily.
- [42:43]
A
In 1875, not only is Charles Hay Cameron's health failing, but the family fortune is failing. These blessed estates in Sri Lanka have drained so much money that they can't afford, continue to afford to live in England. So famously, they pack up, sell fresh water and they bring with them a cow, Cameron's photographic equipment and two coffins. Yes, tell us about this.
- [43:09]
C
Well, the coffins were stuffed with glass and china, which I think is rather cunning. I'm not sure if it's whether they thought they. They couldn't have coffins made where they're going. I think it was more that given their great age, age, they'd probably need a coffin quite fast. So it's useful to have one already, but, yeah, it's a practical thing to do. And by that stage, you know, they'd both travelled so much, they were frequent fliers, so, you know, but they didn't tell anyone for ages that they were moving to Ceylon because she knew that all her friends and family back home would object. So they kept their plans secret for quite a while. And I don't know whether Julia originally actually wanted to move, but. But Mr. Cameron was really set on it and she loved it and she was willing to go. And in a way, I mean, she did continue with her photography while she was out there, but I'm not sure if it's about the supplies or the conditions. You know, it was harder. So we have fewer, only 30 images.
- [44:10]
A
I know this story for sure is that there was an enormous selection of her Sri Lankan photographs in the National Museum in Colombo, and I know various people in Sri Lanka who are still looking for them. They may yet turn up. But until, I mean, until Fairly recently, like 20 years ago or 30 years ago, there was an enormous selection of her Sri Lanka photographs that have simply gone missing. Anyway, I'm off and I'm off to Sri Lanka to on Friday to go to Dumbala and see where she's buried, which I've never did. You ever make it there? You had a plan?
- [44:42]
C
No, I was too far across the country. We were both there at the same time. We crossed over. We still didn't make it. So I'm to going glad that you're returning to finally pay your respects. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
- [44:53]
A
And just tell us briefly, after retiring to this newly opened tea and coffee plantations up above Noreli at an estate still called Dimbala with beautiful hillside views out over the amazing mountains of Sri Lanka, she settles very happily there for what, the last five years?
- [45:15]
C
Yeah, it's a very short time they're really there for but we have sort of comments. So the traveler and artist Marion north went to visit. She was invited over and of course very rapidly was asked to sit for Cameron. She was delighted to have a new subject appear. And Marianne north comments that when she arrives she found Mr. Cameron really sublimely happy. And the walls were covered with Julia Margaret Cameron's magnificent pictures which tumbled all over the tables and chairs and mixed with the books and draperies and she agreed to be photographed. And then she reported that Julia had made me stand with spiky coconut branches running into my head and told me to look perfectly natural. So up to her old tricks I think but you know. And she said she liked one of her shawls and Julia Margaret Cameron immediately got some scissors and cut the shawl in half and gave her the other half. Half. So you know, they did return to London once more. 1878. They returned to London to see their family and then they came back and then they. And then Julia died first.
- [46:25]
A
There's a lovely description of her last days. The Camerons were in Calatura by the end of the year and they moved into Henry's bungalow, Glen Cairn in the mountains. It was there that Cameron herself fell in ill, probably from her old bronchial complaint. No doubt exacerbated by all these chemicals she'd been using. Yeah, I'm sure for many years. After a 10 day illness she died on January 26th. It has been told and retold that on her deathbed Cameron looked out of her window at the evening sky and uttered one last word. Beautiful. I love that story.
- [46:59]
C
That's so lovely. I feel like they were happy to the end and she was creating her arm start, you know, almost to the end.
- [47:05]
A
So it's a lovely storygraphs of the. Her photographs of Sri Lanka are of these Tamil plantation workers. But they're treated like models. They are. Which itself was unusual for the Victorian period. They're arranged exactly as she would have arranged Darwin or Herschel or Rossetti or Burne Jones or any of these characters who sat for her in England. Except that they're incredibly beautiful Tamil plantation workers carrying pots. And she loved it.
- [47:36]
C
Yeah, the monumentalizing of her lens. She made them look, you know, grand and noble and elegant and they're really beautiful portraits.
- [47:48]
A
Well, that's all we have time for today. Please go and see the wonderful exhibition the Patel Sisters, which Emily had worked on for so long along with many other other of her wonderful colleagues. Go Simon Oberoi and Karina Henderson. There's a wonderful catalog which you edited and I contributed an essay to which got cut in half. And then yes, it's such a good.
- [48:10]
C
Essay, I made it into two.
- [48:14]
A
And it you have the all the sisterhood there with their Indian background and anyone who's interested in the. The Indian background of Virginia Woolf or Vanessa Bell will find all the material there on that subject which I know has stirred up a lot of interest in India. Anyway, thank you very much Emily for coming to us today. The exhibition the Patel Sisters is on until May, so you've got some time to do it. I'll be giving some lectures there in early February, so look at the Watts Gallery gallery website. So goodbye from me, William Durimple.
- [48:53]
C
And goodbye from me, Emily Burns.
- [49:01]
F
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G
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