Editing Julia Margaret Cameron (section)

=== Influences ===
[[File:King Lear allotting his Kingdom to his three daughters, by Julia Margaret Cameron.jpg|thumb|King Lear allotting his Kingdom to his three daughters. Sitters are Lorina Liddell, Edith Liddell, Charles Hay Cameron and Alice Liddell.]]
Cameron was an educated and cultured woman; she was a Christian thinker familiar with medieval art, the Renaissance, and the [[Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood|Pre-Raphaelites]].{{Efn|Of the Pre-Raphaelites, "she was closest in her artistic ideals and the ethos of her work to G. F. Watts".<ref name="Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" />|name=|}}<ref name="Genius of the Glass House" /> She may also have been influenced by the contemporary interest in [[phrenology]], the study of the skull as a sign of a person's character.<ref name="Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography" /> The [[Old Master]]s also informed her work. Her compositions and use of light have been connected to [[Raphael]], [[Rembrandt]], and [[Titian]].<ref name="Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" />

John Herschel, who relayed to Cameron the news of the inventions of photography by [[Henry Fox Talbot|Talbot]] and [[Louis Daguerre|Daguerre]],<ref name="The Complete Photographs" />{{Rp|42}} was an important influence on technique and the practicalities of the medium, as indicated in a letter Cameron wrote to the astronomer, "You were my first teacher and to you I owe all the first experience and insights."<ref name="Soft-focus Photographer" />

It is likely that Cameron saw [[Reginald Southey]] photographing on the Isle of Wight during a holiday in 1857 when he visited the Camerons and photographed their children and the children of her neighbours, the Tennysons, before Cameron took up the camera in earnest.<ref name="The Complete Photographs" />{{Rp|42}}

Perhaps the most important photographer to influence Cameron's work was [[David Wilkie Wynfield]]. Much like Cameron, Wynfield published soft-focus portraits of friends dressed up as characters from history or literature.<ref name="Angels and Instincts" /> The press compared their photographic work and noted the similarities in style and their consideration of the medium as fine art.<ref name="The Complete Photographs" />{{Rp|46}} Cameron's style of close-up portraits resembling Titian may well have been learned from Wynfield, since she took a lesson from him and later wrote "I consult him in correspondence whenever I am in difficulty".<ref name="Soft-focus Photographer" /> The [[Arts council|Arts Council]] booklet to accompany the 1951 [[Festival of Britain]] photography exhibition quoted from an 11-page "holograph letter" (exhibit 471) to [[William Michael Rossetti]] in which she states: "To [Wynfield's] beautiful photography I owed ''all'' my attempts and indeed consequently all my success."<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Arts Council |title=Masterpieces of Victorian Photography |date=1951 |publisher=Arts Council |location=London |pages=32}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |year=2016 |title=Julia Margaret Cameron: Related Photographers |url=http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/j/julia-margaret-cameron-related-photographers/ |access-date=25 March 2018 |publisher=Victoria and Albert Museum}}</ref>

==== Concept of genius and beauty ====
Cameron's portraits are partly the product of her intimacy and regard for the subject, but also intend to capture "particular qualities or essences—typically, genius in men and beauty in women".<ref name="Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" /> Mike Weaver, a scholar who wrote about Cameron's photography in work published in 1984, framed her idea of genius and beauty "within a specifically Christian framework, as indicative of the sublime and the sacred".<ref name="Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" /> Weaver supposes that Cameron's myriad influences informed her concept of beauty: "the Bible, classical mythology, Shakespeare's plays, and Tennyson's poems were fused into a single vision of ideal beauty."<ref name="Genius of the Glass House" />

Cameron herself indicated her desire to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied"<ref name="The Complete Photographs" />{{Rp|175}}<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20051210080742/http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/quotations/quotefrom/codandcamera/ AskOxford: The Cod and the Camera<!-- Bot generated title -->] Quote is taken from her unpublished autobiography, "Annals of My Glass House".</ref> and "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty."<ref name="Victoria and Albert Museum" />

Her female subjects were typically chosen for their beauty,<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Oxford Companion to the Photograph|last=Ford|first=Colin|date=2005|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-866271-6|chapter=Cameron, Julia Margaret|access-date=28 April 2019|chapter-url=http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198662716.001.0001/acref-9780198662716-e-254|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0000unse_f1h1}}</ref> particularly the "long-necked, long-haired, immature beauty familiar in Pre-Raphaelite paintings".<ref name="Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography" /> In [[Virginia Woolf]]'s farcical play ''Freshwater'', which described the cultural scene at Freshwater, Cameron's character comically expresses her commitment to beauty:<blockquote>I have sought the beautiful in the most unlikely places. I have searched the police force at Freshwater, and not a man have I found with calves worthy of [[Galahad|Sir Galahad]]. But, as I said to the Chief Constable, "Without beauty, constable, what is order? Without life, what is law?" Why should I continue to have my silver protected by a race of men whose legs are aesthetically abhorrent to me? If a burgler came and he were beautiful, I should say to him: Take my fish knives! Take my cruets, my bread baskets and my soup tureens. What you take is nothing to what you give, your calves, your beautiful calves.<ref name="Genius of the Glass House" /></blockquote>