Lionel Tennyson, Freshwater

Julia Margaret Cameron British, born India

Not on view

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.

Lionel Tennyson, Freshwater, Julia Margaret Cameron (British (born India), Calcutta 1815–1879 Kalutara, Ceylon), Albumen silver print from glass negative

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