Julia Margaret Cameron Madonna with Children 1864

  • Not on view

Although Julia Margaret Cameron took up photography relatively late in life, she embraced the medium, producing a distinctive body of work. Mother to a large family of children, her turn to photography was prompted by the gift of a camera from her only daughter in 1863. She was soon making sensitive portraits of some of the most notable Victorians of her day, among them author Charles Dickens and philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle. Cameron also cast her friends, family members, and strangers alike in allegorical roles for staged scenes based on art historical, biblical, literary, and romantic themes—irrespective of their social standing in the rigid Victorian class system.

Many of Cameron’s images feature women in idealized scenes of motherhood, as in Madonna with Children. Here she evokes the Virgin Mary with this tender vision of a mother and her two children surrounded by what appears to be a large white halo. She often draped her subjects in dark cloaks and set them against plain backgrounds, which lend a timeless quality to her images. By adjusting the focus of her lens to create a soft, slightly blurred effect, she referenced the qualities of painting. Cameron and her pictorialist contemporaries pursued painterly compositions, subjects, and qualities, hoping to elevate photography to a high art.

Medium
Albumen silver print
Dimensions
10 1/2 × 8 5/8" (26.7 × 21.9 cm)
Credit
Gift of Shirley C. Burden
Object number
328.1968
Department
Photography

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].