Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) arrived in Ceylon singularly provisioned, bringing with her, besides the apparatus of her art, a live cow and two coffins, against the possibility that such things should prove unobtainable in the East. She had come in 1875 in the company of her ailing husband Charles Hay Cameron, whose fortunes were bound to the coffee estates of the island. Born in Calcutta and celebrated throughout Britain as the foremost portrait photographer of the Victorian age, she found the island unkind to her work: fewer than thirty of her Ceylon photographs survive, the humid climate having destroyed the greater part of her glass negatives, and the majority of those remaining are portraits of Tamil servants and estate labourers. When Marianne North came to the Cameron house at Kalutara, upon the south-western coast, Cameron, as North recorded in her memoirs, fell ‘into a fever of excitement at having a European subject’.

For three days Cameron photographed her, arraying her in flowing cashmere and posing her against a screen of spiky coconut palms in a temperature of ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit. Cameron, as North recorded with characteristic dryness, ‘told me to look perfectly natural’. Four of the photographs survive. The most remarkable represents North at her easel upon the verandah of the Kalutara house, a painter recorded by a photographer, and two of the greatest women artists of Victorian Britain contained within a single frame, upon the western coast of an island at the utmost edge of empire. Cameron died in Ceylon on 26 January 1879; her last word is said to have been ‘Beautiful.’