1994.9
Portrait of Maud
Artist
Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle)
(Calcutta, 1815 - 1879, Dikoya Valley, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka))
Title
Portrait of Maud
Creation Date
1870-1872
Century
19th century
Dimensions
13 1/2 in. x 11 in. (34.29 cm. x 27.94 cm.)
Classification
Photographs
Creation Place
Europe, United Kingdom
Medium and Support
vintage albumen print from glass plate negative
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund
Copyright
Public Domain
Accession Number
1994.9
Julia Margaret Cameron was a self-taught nineteenth-century photographer who, for approximately a decade during the height of the Victorian Era, made photographs of family, friends, and people hired to work for the family. By using photography to illustrate allegorical, religious, and literary themes, Cameron sought to raise the medium to a level of erudition equal with that of painting. In this photograph, Cameron’s parlor maid, Mary Hillier, poses as Maud, the title character of a Tennyson poem about a melancholic man’s forbidden love for the “queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls”. Deliberately photographed slightly out of focus, this moody visualization of Tennyson’s poem shows a somber young woman standing against a brick wall wreathed in passionflowers.