The Passion Flower at the Gate

Unlike Cameron’s male subjects—Victorian Britain’s most renowned poets, artists, scientists, and philosophers—her female sitters were most often relatives, neighbors, or household servants, in whom she found qualities of innocence, virtue, wisdom, piety, or passion that suggested modern embodiments of classical, religious, and literary figures. This photograph of Mary Pinnock, a fellow resident on the Isle of Wight, takes its title from lines in a poem by Cameron’s next-door neighbor, the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson: There has fallen a splendid tear / From the passion-flower at the gate.