Art News

Bonhams to sell Julia Margaret Cameron’s intimate image of Virginia Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson

LONDON.- One of the highlights of Bonhams’ Photographs sale on 17 November 2011, at New Bond Street, is an intimate portrait of Julia Jackson by British photography pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). One of around fifty known portraits by Cameron of her niece, the earliest dating from 1864, it has attracted a pre-sale estimate of £25,000 – 35,000. Cameron’s portraits are currently subject to special focus in the Victoria and Albert’s Museum’s new Photographs Gallery (opening to the public on October 25). As Martin Barnes, senior curator of photographs at the museum, says: “She [Cameron] broke all the rules of lighting and scale. Her pictures are technically out of focus, but compared to the formal portraits of the time, hers were luscious, dark and magical.” This portrait dates from the spring of 1867 when Cameron visited the Jackson family in Kent and took a series of studies of th