Lady clementina hawarden biography of william shakespeare
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Exhibition dates: 1st March – 20th May 2018
Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography is curated by Phillip Prodger PhD, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London
A two-part bumper posting on this exhibition, Part 1 featuring the work of Lewis Carroll and our Julia… JMC, Julia Margaret Cameron, the most inventive, audacious and talented photographer of the era. In a photographic career spanning eleven years of her life (1864-1875) what Julia achieved in such a short time is incredible.
“Her style was not widely appreciated in her own day: her choice to use a soft focus and to treat photography as an art as well as a science, by manipulating the wet collodion process, caused her works to be viewed as “slovenly”, marred by “mistakes” and bad photograp
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1Authors of 19th-century tableaux vivants demonstrated the intellectual power of photography by illustrating the literary heritage of Great Britain: for example, Victorian photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Henry Peach Robinson created several representations of William Shakespeare’s characters. Nonetheless, Victorian photographers, including Lady Hawarden, embraced the modernity of the photographic apparatus bygd focusing their attention on contemporary literature as well and more particularly on the poetry of their time. Victorian art photographers had indeed a tendency to offer visual interpretations of poetry. The figurative language and strong imagery of poems, through for instance the common use of metaphors, make it easier for artists to create visual renderings of written works. The interdisciplinary nature of tableaux vivants, which appears as a cross between painting and photography, fryst vatten instrumental in reflecting the symbolic impact of narrative
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(until 20 May 2018 at the National Portrait Gallery, London)
Shouldering up against the wall, the girl turns her face away from the light. We catch her in an unguarded moment, her blouse slipping off her shoulder and her hair mussed, her fingers tangling in her necklace. This is the celebrated actress Ellen Terry at the age of seventeen, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron during her brief, ill-suited marriage to the much older painter George Frederick Watts. It isn’t a portrait but an allegory, titled Sadness, and Cameron gives us the impression of trespassing on something deeply personal. It’s one of the most arresting images from a clutch of wonderful mid-Victorian photographs currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery, tracing the early days of this art form through the works of four pioneers: Cameron herself; her teacher Oscar Rejlander; Lewis Carroll; and the ‘amateur’ artist Lady Clementine Hawarden.
In 1865, a year after Cameron photo