Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1878) n 1848, the year of the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Charles Cameron retired from his profession as jurist in India. He returned to England, bringing with him his wife, Julia Margaret,. For a time Mrs. Cameron found an outlet for her intense, yet sociable nature, in the London milieu of her sister Sarah Prinsep. AT little Holland House Mrs. Prinsep gathered round her men for whom visions of the Ideal and the Beautiful were stuff of the life: Tennyson, Browning, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts. In 1860, the Camerons moved to the Isle of Wight to be near the Tennysons. A life of mingled rural and intellectual pleasures followed, but for a while Mrs. Cameron was frustrated and depressed. Then, in 1863, her daughter had a happy inspiration - and gave her a camera. "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me", wrote Julia, "and at length the longing has been satisfied". Photography quickly became her passion and remained so until she returned to the Subcontinent with her husband twelve years later. Mrs. Cameron's long years of intellectual apprenticeship in artistic circles meant that she brought to her hobby a remarkable sureness of vision. There is a parallel with Rosetti. The painter had apprehended that sharp delineation was inappropriate to the Spirit World her wished to conjure up. He thus adopted freer, softer handling. Mrs. Cameron, also, rejected the sharp outlines of earlier wet plate photography. Soft focus, combined with rigorous close-up and exclusion of incidentals lend particular authority to her portraits of the great figures of the age. Her images of Tennyson, Carlyle, Herschel and others plainly achieve the spiritual penetration which was her aim. Indeed they are among the masterpieces of nineteenth-century visual art.