Julia Margaret Cameron was a 48-year-old mother of six, and a deeply religious, well-read, and somewhat eccentric friend of many notable Victorian artists, poets, and thinkers when she received her first camera as a Christmas gift in 1863 from her daughter Julia and son-in-law Charles Norman. In the following decade, she became one of the medium’s supreme portraitists. “From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour,” she wrote, “and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.” Condemned by some contemporaries for sloppy craftsmanship, she purposely avoided the perfect resolution and minute detail that glass negatives permitted, opting instead for carefully directed light, soft focus, and long exposures that allowed her sitters’ slight movement to register in her pictures, instilling them with a sense of breath and life. In 1869 Cameron prepared a gift for Julia and Charles Norman in return—this album of espe­cially fine prints, which descended within the Norman family until its purchase in 2021 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.