While Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of men usually portrayed Victorian luminaries, her female subjects were most often friends, relatives, or household servants presented in the guise of literary, historical, or biblical figures. Here, she presents her beautiful young housemaid Mary Hillier as Adriana, the lead female character in Henry Taylor’s play Philip van Artevelde, which Cameron greatly admired. This portrait, in perfect profile, was perhaps inspired by the chromolithographic reproductions of early Renaissance paintings distributed by the Arundel Society, of which Cameron was a member.