Queen of the May (1875): Art, History and Details

Queen of the May (1875) 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:

A major figure in the development of British photography, Cameron elevated the portrait to new artistic heights. She never opened a commercial studio or accepted commissions, but she was one of the first photographers to sell her photographs through a fine art gallery. Friends, neighbors, family, and servants were cajoled into modeling for portraits as themselves and as allegorical figures from history, religion, mythology, and literature. Little is known about Emily Peacock, who posed here as the protagonist in The May Queen by Britain’s poet laureate Alfred Tennyson. Typically crowned with flowers, the May Queen is selected as part of the celebrations on May 1, a traditional spring holiday in many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere.

Object facts

• Title: Queen of the May
• Date: 1875
• Creator attribution: Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815–1879)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 34.9 x 26.6 cm (13 3/4 x 10 1/2 in.); Matted: 66 x 55.9 cm (26 x 22 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1984.166

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Tom E. Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. [Cleveland, OH]: The Museum, 1996.
• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1984." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 72, no. 2 (1985): 163-207.

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.