Nominated for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2017. The Victorians admired Julia Margaret Cameron for her evocative photographic portraits of eminent men like Tennyson, Carlyle and Darwin. However, Cameron also made numerous photographs that she called 'Fancy subjects', depicting scenes from literature, personifications from classical mythology, and Biblical parables from the Old and New Testament. This book is the first comprehensive study of these works, examining Cameron's use of historical allegories and popular iconography to embed moral, intellectual and political narratives in her photographs. A work of cultural history as much as art history, this book examines cartoons from Punch and line drawings from the Illustrated London News, cabinet photographs and autotype prints, textiles and wall paper, book illustrations and lithographs from period folios, all as a way to contextualise the allegorical subjects that Cameron represented, revealing connections between her 'Fancy subjects' and popular debates about such topics as Biblical interpretation, democratic government and colonial expansion.

Profiles the life and work of a nineteenth century pioneer of photography and offers a selection of her portraits of women

Annals of My Glass House highlights the work of the most famous Victorian woman photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. Although she did not begin her career until the age of 49, after rearing six children, she produced almost 3,000 photographs from 1864 until her death in 1879. Violet Hamilton's examination of Cameron's photography begins with her first successful recorded work in 1864 and ends in 1874 with her brief autobiography, "Annals of My Glass House", included here. The major thematic categories of her work are considered, including her portraits of prominent Victorians, poetic interpretations of Madonnas and children, and illustrations for Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Among Cameron's photographs are intimate studies of her own family and powerful portraits of Victorian artists, writers, and scientists, including historian Thomas Carlyle and astronomer Sir John Herschel.

According to one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s great-nieces, “we never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did anyone else.” This is an accurate summation of the life of the British photographer (1815–1879), who took up the camera at age forty-eight and made more than twelve hundred images during a fourteen-year career. Living at the height of the Victorian era, Cameron was anything but conventional, experimenting with the relatively new medium of photography, promoting her own art though exhibition and sale, and pursuing the eminent personalities of her age—Alfred Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, and others—as subjects for her lens. For the first time, all known images by Cameron, one of the most important nineteenth-century artists in any medium, are gathered together in a catalogue raisonné. In addition to a complete catalogue of Cameron’s photographs, there is information on her life and times, initial experiments, artistic aspirations, techniques, small-format images, albums, commercial strategies, sitters, and sources of inspiration. Also provided are a selected bibliography of publications on Cameron, a list of exhibitions of her work held both in her time as well as our own, and a summary of important collections where her pictures can be found.

First published in 1998, this volume reflects that, ever since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism twenty years ago, scholars have tested his thesis against the wider application of his terms to cultural practices and the rhetoric of power. The cultural impact of the British on their colonies has been extensively investigated but only recently have scholars begun to ask in what ways British culture was transformed by its contact with the colonies. The essays in this volume demonstrate how influential the Empire was on British culture from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. They show how, from cross-cultural cross-dressing to Buddhism, British artists and writers appropriated unfamiliar and challenging aspects of the culture of the Empire for their own purposes. An examination is also made of the extent to which colonized people engaged in the orientalising discourse, amending and subverting it, even re-applying its stereotypes to the British themselves. Finally, two essays explore instances of the exchange of ideas between colonies. Several of the essays are based on papers given at the 1996 Conference of the College Arts Association.

This introduction to the greatest women photographers from the 19th century to today features the most important works of 60 artists, along with in-depth biographical and critical assessments.

Portraiture, the most popular genre of painting, occupies a central position in the history of Western art. Despite this, its status within academic art theory is uncertain. This volume provides an introduction to major issues in its history.