Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1865

Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 - 1879)

RA Collection: Art

Photogravure printed by H.H.H.Cameron and his partner J.C. Smith from negatives by Julia Margaret Cameron for the publication Alfred, Lord Tennyson And His Friends. In the introduction, Cameron quotes from his mother's memoir Annals of my Glasshouse.

'Meanwhile I took another immortal head, that of Alfred Tennyson, and the result was that profile portrait which he himself designates as the Dirty Monk. It is a fit representation of Isaiah or of Jeremiah, and Sir Henry Taylor said the picture was as fine as Alfred Tennyson's finest poem. '

In 1874 Tennyson asked Mrs Cameron to make illustrations for a popular edition of the Idylls. However, when the book came to be published Mrs Cameron's large scale photographs had been replaced with small woodcuts. Undeterrred, later that year, she published at her own expense a further edition which illustrated, with albumen prints, incidents from Tennyson's Idylls. The frontispiece of which was this photograph of Tennyson. The following year she produced another volume illustrating the Idylls, Maud, May Queen and The Princess.