Legend has it that Julia Margaret Cameron’s last word, as she lay on her deathbed on a tea estate in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1879, was “beauty”. Her version of beauty was somewhat classical and in keeping with the pre-Raphaelite ideals of her era: pious, pure and white – long, wavy hair, flower crowns and diaphanous dresses. She became an expert at preserving this vision, using the sliding box camera she received as a gift aged 48 to master both the wet collodion process, where a piece of glass is coated with collodion and exposed, and albumen printing – coating paper with egg white to give a sharper, glossier effect.
A vast collection of Cameron’s vintage prints are shown alongside pieces by the enigmatic American artist Francesca Woodman in the National Portrait Gallery’s Portraits to Dream In. Woodman, working from the 1970s, shared a similar predilection for a certain kind of beauty, more sexy, though still demure – both she and Cameron inherited, perhaps, a way of seeing the world from their artistic, cultured families and privileged upbringings. In her self-portraits, made when Woodman was still a teenager (her earliest work, included here, was taken at the tender age of 13) show a body still working itself out, within space. Time reveals itself in the details – the same pair of black Mary Jane shoes recurs in several pictures; Woodman, like Cameron, produced her body of work in less than 15 years. Neither was very well respected while they were alive – but their legacy has long outlived them and both have been phenomenally influential.
