One of the greatest portraitists in the history of
photography, Julia Margaret Cameron was 48 and a mother of six when she
received her first camera as a Christmas gift in 1863. In the few years that
followed, this deeply religious, well-read, somewhat eccentric friend of
notable Victorian artists, poets, and thinkers created a gallery of vivid
portraits and a mirror of the Victorian soul.

This portrait of Cameron’s favorite niece and namesake,
Julia Jackson, suggestive of an antique cameo carved in high relief, was made
the year she married Herbert Duckworth. Three years later, Jackson was a widow
and the mother of three children. By her second marriage to Sir Leslie Stephen
in 1878, Julia Jackson was the mother of the painter Vanessa Bell and the
writer Virginia Woolf.