Charles Norman with His Daughters Adeline and Margaret

July 1874

Medium

Albumen silver print

Dimensions

29.8 × 26.7 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-618410

> In 1873 there was a marked downturn in Julia Margaret Cameron’s production. She made very few new photographs and registered just two images for copyright. She concentrated her energies on exhibitions, which included a large one-woman show in Hanover Square, London, and a representative selection of prints sent to the Universal Exhibition, Vienna. The lull in her activity was almost certainly the result of the death of her daughter Julia Norman (1838-1873), at age thirty-four. Already a mother of six (like Cameron), Norman went the way of Minnie Thackeray ([84.XZ.186.100](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/58678/julia-margaret-cameron-minnie-thackeray-british-1865/)) and countless other women of the period and died in childbirth. > > Because her looks were not considered fine enough, Norman was seldom a subject for her mother’s camera, a bitter irony in view of the fact that it was her gift of a camera that had been the catalyst for Cameron’s remarkable career in photography. Cameron’s grief at her death is expressed in a moving series of portraits that she made of the Norman family in the summer of 1874. There is a charged stoicism and solemnity about the grouping of…