Julia Jackson Duckworth (1846-1895) (1867): Art, History and Details

Julia Jackson Duckworth (1846-1895) (1867) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815–1879).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Julia Jackson, the artist’s niece, namesake, goddaughter, and favorite model, is shown at age 21, a few weeks before her wedding. Cameron’s usual soft focus here imparts a sense of becoming, appropriate to this important transformation in a Victorian woman’s life. The daringly modern frontal close-up suggests reflection and self-questioning more characteristic of peering into a mirror than posing before a camera. These two images are from a series of four works based on the same negative, each posited by scholars to be a reversal of the preceding image. Reversing the images alters the face, suggesting that Cameron valued recording Jackson’s inner life more than capturing her likeness. Cameron advanced the photographic portrait from commerce to art and from physiognomic depiction to evocation of a sitter’s soul.

Object facts

• Title: Julia Jackson Duckworth (1846-1895)
• Date: 1867
• Creator attribution: Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815–1879)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 28.4 x 22.4 cm (11 3/16 x 8 13/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1996.343

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Mann

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Museum Masters: 2016-17 Companion Guide. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2016.
• Tannenbaum, Barbara. “Acquisitions 2015: Photography.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 56, no. 2 (March/April 2016): 28-29.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.