An intimate portrait of Julia Jackson by British photography pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), one of the highlights of Bonhams Photographs Sale, realised an impressive £57,250 today (17 November) at the auction house’s New Bond Street saleroom. One of around fifty known portraits by Cameron of her niece, the earliest dating from 1864, it had attracted a pre-sale estimate of £25,000 – 35,000.
It dates from the spring of 1867 when Cameron visited the Jackson family in Kent and took a series of studies of the beautiful twenty-one year old Julia, who was later to marry Victorian intellectual and author, Sir Leslie Stephens. Jackson had four children with Stephens, including Vanessa (Bell) and Virginia (Woolf), who immortalised her mother as Mrs Ramsay in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse.
Cameron’s portraits are currently subject to special focus in the Victoria and Albert’s Museum’s new Photographs Gallery (which opened to the public on October 25).
Top prices were also paid for Robert Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lily, 1986, which made £39,650 and Albert Watson’s Kate Moss, Marrakech, Morocco, 1993, which fetched £16,250, while highlights also included Albert Watson’s Christy Turlington, 1990 (£5,625); Terry O’Neill’s Brigitte Bardot, 1971(£5,000); and Sebastiao Salgado’s Sahara, Algeria, 2009 (£6,875).
It dates from the spring of 1867 when Cameron visited the Jackson family in Kent and took a series of studies of the beautiful twenty-one year old Julia, who was later to marry Victorian intellectual and author, Sir Leslie Stephens. Jackson had four children with Stephens, including Vanessa (Bell) and Virginia (Woolf), who immortalised her mother as Mrs Ramsay in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse.
Cameron’s portraits are currently subject to special focus in the Victoria and Albert’s Museum’s new Photographs Gallery (which opened to the public on October 25).
Top prices were also paid for Robert Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lily, 1986, which made £39,650 and Albert Watson’s Kate Moss, Marrakech, Morocco, 1993, which fetched £16,250, while highlights also included Albert Watson’s Christy Turlington, 1990 (£5,625); Terry O’Neill’s Brigitte Bardot, 1971(£5,000); and Sebastiao Salgado’s Sahara, Algeria, 2009 (£6,875).
