This portrait of Julia Jackson, which is usually trimmed to an oval, suggests an antique cameo carved in deep relief. Its success lies partly in its subject’s actual beauty and partly in the way the photographer modeled it to suggest Christian and classical ideals of purity, strength, and grace. The photograph was made the year Julia married Herbert Duckworth. Three years later she was a widow and the mother of three children.
Her second marriage, in 1878, to the great Victorian intellectual Sir Leslie Stephen, produced the painter Vanessa Bell and the writer Virginia Woolf. In her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia portrayed her mother as the searching, sensitive Mrs. Ramsay, ever suspended in thought. “She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered.”

• Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

  Inscription: Inscribed in pencil in Cameron's hand, verso BC : "Mrs. H. Duckworth"

• Provenance

  (sold, Sotheby Belgravia, March 27, 1981, lot 491); Gilman Paper Company Collection, New York
  
  

• Timeline of Art History (2000–present)
  Thematic Essays

  The Industrialization of French Photography after 1860

  Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)

  Timelines

  Great Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 A.D.