Julia Margaret Cameron was of the most important photographers of the nineteenth century. The wife of a retired jurist, Cameron moved in the highest society in Victorian England. She began her career in photography at the age of forty-eight, when she received a camera as a gift. Working mostly from her home at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, she photographed her circle, among them portrait painter George Frederick Watts, astronomer Sir John Herschel, biologist Charles Darwin and poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She took much inspiration from literature, and her work in turn influenced writers; she also drew extensively on the paintings of Raphael, Giotto, and Michelangelo, whose works she knew through prints that circulated widely in late nineteenth-century England. Her first exhibition was in 1865. Ten years later, having enjoyed great success as a photographer, she left Britain and went to live in Ceylon. Cameron stated that she hoped to 'ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and Beauty.' Her unfinished autobiography, Annals of my Glasshouse, was published in 1889.
