Charles Hay Cameron, Esq., in His Garden at Freshwater

In 1836, convalescing from an illness at the Cape of Good Hope, Julia Margaret Pattle met the scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel and the classical scholar and jurist Charles Hay Cameron, twenty years her senior. Two years later, in February 1838, she and Cameron were married in Calcutta. In the following decade, Charles rose to the positions of president of the Calcutta Council of Education and member of the Supreme Council of India, and Julia Margaret played an increasingly important role in social and diplomatic circles of British India. When Charles retired in 1848, he, Julia Margaret, and their six children moved to England, where three of her sisters were already living in or near London.
Charles was frequently pressed into service as a photographic model—not only for straightforward portraits such as this one but also for his wife’s more theatrical pictures. In other photographs, Mr. Cameron appears as King Lear and as Merlin.