JULIA MARGARET CAMERON 1815-1879 Sir John Hers

Provenance
A. C. Norman, Bromley Common, Kent, 1920s;
On loan to Royal Photographic Society from 1929, released May 17, 1978;
Thackrey & Robertson, San Francisco, 1978;
Collection of Paul F. Walter, New York;
Fine Photographs From the Collection of Paul F. Walter, Sotheby's London, May 10, 2001, lot 113 (cover);
to the present Private Collection

Literature
Cox & Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, 2003, fig. 676, p. 324. See: Schaaf, Sir John Herschel and the Invention of Photography, The Royal Photographic Society, 1981;
Schaaf, Out of the Shadows Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of Photography, 1993. See: Ford, The Cameron Collection An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron Presented to Sir John Herschel, 1975, for further information on Cameron and Herschel's relationship.

"When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer."
-Julia Margaret Cameron, Annals of My Glass House, 1874

To be concise, every photographer who ever lived owes his or her career to Sir John Herschel. Herschel, a chemist and astronomer, experimented continually with light sensitive materials and photographic chemistry. In 1819 he discovered that the compound hyposulfate of soda dissolved silver salts, meaning that he had found the chemical solution to "fixing" photographic materials for permanency. It wasn't until 1839, however, when conducting experiments on his own light sensitive solutions that he found that he could make permanent the previously transient images he wrestled out of his hand coated substrates. He noted that the experiment "Succeeds perfectly."

The work offered here, executed in April 1867, is of the man Cameron referred to in her autobiography as "a Teacher and High Priest". The two had known each other since 1836 when they met at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa while Herschel was surveying the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. Cameron was half the age of the astronomer; his influence on her was immediate and lasting. It was Herschel who, in 1842, sent Cameron the first examples of photography she had ever seen. Cameron, living in India with her family, corresponded with Herschel consistently. Though the scientist kept her abreast of developments in the medium, it wasn't until well after her return to England in 1848 and after her childrearing responsibilities settled that she immersed herself in the practice of photography. In 1863 she received a gift of a camera from her daughter and for the ensuing fourteen years she created a remarkable body of portraiture, unlike any executed before or since. Her debt to Herschel was never absolved, "I remember gratefully that the very first information I ever had of Photography in its Infant Life of Talbotype & Daguerreotype was in a letter I received from you in Calcutta," (Cox and Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, p. 42).

This print of Sir John Herschel has a celebrated past. Prior to the present owner acquiring it, it was most recently in the collection of Paul F. Walter, a New Yorker who, beginning in 1975, joined a small cadre of dedicated collectors including Sam Wagstaff, John Waddell, Richard Sandor and Richard and Robert Menschel, whose commitments to photography have influenced the directions of museums and private collectors that have followed.