Herr Joachim

One of the nineteenth-century’s greatest violinists, the Hungarian-born Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) was a close friend and collaborator of Johannes Brahms, Robert and Clara Schumann, and, early in his career, Franz Liszt. In March 1868 he performed works by Beethoven and Bach at St. James’s Hall, London, “listened to with breathless attention, and received with such tumults of applause as must almost have astonished the great artist himself,” according to the Morning Post. “The execution by Herr Joseph Joachim of each of these grand, elaborate, and trying pieces, was beyond all praise—worthy, indeed, of one who, as a master of the violin, has long been without an equal.”
It was during this trip to London that the violinist sat for Cameron in the studio she set up at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert), where her photographs had been acquired and exhibited as early as 1865. She never ran a commercial studio or accepted portrait commissions, choosing instead to seek out those poets, painters, scientists, and other notables with whom she felt a spiritual and intellectual kinship and whose images the public might desire.