On February 21, 1866, Cameron wrote to Henry Cole, director of the South Kensington Museum, “I have been for 8 weeks nursing poor Philip Worsley on his dying bed. . . . The heart of man cannot conceive a sight more pitiful than the outward evidence of the breaking up of his whole being.” An Oxford-educated poet who translated the Odyssey and part of the Iliad into Spenserian verse, Worsley died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty the following May. Cameron’s portrait, made the year of his death, vividly conveys the intensity of Worsley’s intellectual life and something of its tragedy. To her subject’s hypnotic gravity she added intimations of sacrifice, engulfing the dying poet in dramatic darkness.
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Title:Philip Stanhope Worsley
Artist:Julia Margaret Cameron (British (born India), Calcutta 1815–1879 Kalutara, Ceylon)
Date:1866
Medium:Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions:Image: 30.4 x 25 cm (11 15/16 x 9 13/16 in.) Mount: 40.9 x 30.6 cm (16 1/8 x 12 1/16 in.), irregular
Classification:Photographs
Credit Line:Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
Accession Number:2005.100.27
Inscription: Signed in ink on mount, below image BR: "Julia Margaret Cameron"; inscribed in Cameron's hand in ink on mount, below image BL: "From Life"; inscribed in ink on mount, recto BC: "Philip Stanhope Worsley"
[...]; (sold, Christie's, South Kensington, London, Lot 456, June 26, 1980); Gilman Paper Company Collection, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century, Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection," May 25–July 4, 1993.
Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland. "The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century, Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection," August 7–October 2, 1993.
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. "The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century, Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection," June 19–September 11, 1994.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "Julia Margaret Cameron: Victorian Photographer," March 17, 1998–June 7, 1998.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Masterpieces of Photography from the Gilman Paper Company Collection," February 26–May 23, 1999.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Portraits: A Century of Photographs," September 10, 2002–January 13, 2003.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Johnson Gallery, Selections from the Collection 40," April 19–July 10, 2005.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840–1940," June 3–September 1, 2008.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Julia Margaret Cameron," August 19, 2013–January 5, 2014.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin: Recent Acquisitions, A Selection: 2004-2005 p. 36.
Apraxine, Pierre. Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company. Reeds Springs, Mo.: White Oak Press, 1985. pl. 74.
Hambourg, Maria Morris, Pierre Apraxine, Malcolm Daniel, Virginia Heckert, and Jeff L. Rosenheim. The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century, Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993. no. 35.
Cox, Julian, and Colin Ford. Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003. no. 834.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. p. 441.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British (born India), Calcutta 1815–1879 Kalutara, Ceylon)
September 1874
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