Cameron generally portrayed her male sitters undisguised, in part because they were genu­inely heroic—“men great thro’ genius,” she wrote—and in part because there existed a market for portraits of Britain’s renowned poets, artists, scientists, and philosophers. By contrast, her female subjects (housemaid Mary Hillier here) were not celebrities—they were great “thro’ Love.” In them, Cameron found qualities of innocence, virtue, wisdom, piety, or passion that made them modern embodiments of classical, religious, and literary figures. For her, photography was a form of devotion, of prayer, and her religious compositions were not illustrations, they were embodiments of her belief.