Julia Margaret Cameron, bold portraitist of the Victorians

Or, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’s great aunt? At the Jeu de Paume this fall

Rear garden, Jeu de Paume, in spring. Photo by author.

Paris’s premier photo gallery, the Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries, has mounted a major exhibition of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, to run from October 2023 through the end of January 2024. The exhibit is one stop on a traveling show organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which holds the largest collection of Cameron works.

One of the only portraits of Cameron herself, by her son Henry Herschel Hay Cameron. Open access photo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Born in Calcutta in 1815, Julia Margaret Pattle was a true daughter of the heedless, arrogant British imperial class. Her father worked for the East India Company; her mother was French. Julia and her sisters were shipped off to France for their education. They lived with their grandmother in Versailles for the duration, then traveled back to their family home in India.

“I Wait” (Rachel Gurney, 1872). One of Cameron’s images inspired by classical and religious mythology. Accessed 10/29/2023, Open Content program, Getty Museum.

Cameron stumbled into photography in 1863, at forty-eight, when her daughter and son-in-law gave her a camera. This…