The Wild Flower (Mary Ryan)

Public Domain

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Artist Julia Margaret Cameron(British, born India, 1815–1879)British, born India, 1815–1879

CultureBritish

Titles

The Wild Flower (Mary Ryan)

Date1867

PlaceEngland

MediumAlbumen silver print from glass negative

DimensionsImage: 3 5/8 × 2 7/8 in. (9.2 × 7.3 cm)
Mount: 6 7/16 × 4 3/16 in. (16.4 × 10.6 cm)

Credit LineThe Sonia and Kaye Marvins Portrait Collection, museum purchase funded by Sonia and Kaye Marvins

Object number86.128

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Marvins Family Collections

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

Description

A devoted mother, a devout Christian, and the wife of a high colonial official in India twenty years her senior, Julia Margaret Cameron began her photographic career when she was nearly fifty years old. She was extremely well-read and a friend of the writers Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to mention only a few. Whenever she could, Cameron imposed upon her famous acquaintances, family, and servants to pose for her, insisting they endure excruciatingly long sessions before her camera. Her soft-focus style, the result of intuition more than design, suited her all-pervasive love for the ideal and for beauty.

Though actually not published as an illustration for Blake's poem, this photograph is an allegorical representation of the ideas embodied in the passage quoted above. The girl is Mary Ryan, a maidservant and ward of Cameron who frequently assisted and modeled for her. The photograph is dedicated to "the bride of King Cophetua," a reference to one of the illustrations Cameron had made for Tennyson's Idylls of the King using her "Irish begger maid" Mary as one of the characters in the story.
Provenance[Photocollect, New York]; purchased by MFAH, 1986.
Published References Ford 1975, p. 101; Weaver 1984, p. 73; Wolf 1998, pl. 22. Tucker, Anne W., Maggie Olvey, R. Eric Davis, Harlow Tighe, and William R. Thompson. The Sonia and Kaye Marvins Portrait Collection. Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1995, 11. Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscribed on the bottom center of the mount recto: "The wild flower // my dear little Beggar maid // the Bride of King Cophetua // From life Copyright Julia Margaret Cameron"

Catalogue raisonné2003, plate 455

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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