Saint Cecilia after the manner of Raphael

Julia Margaret Cameron's career as a photographer began in 1863 when her daughter gave her a camera. Cameron began photographing everyone in sight. Because of the newness of photography as a practice, she was free to make her own rules and not be bound to convention. The kinds of images being made at the time did not interest Cameron. She was interested in capturing another kind of photographic truth. Not one dependent on accuracy of sharp detail, but one that depicted the emotional state of her sitter.

Cameron liked the soft focus portraits and the streak marks on her negatives, choosing to work with these irregularities, making them part of her pictures. Although at the time Cameron was seen as an unconventional and experimental photographer, her images have a solid place in the history of photography.

Most of Cameron's photographs are portraits. She used members of her family as sitters and made photographs than concentrated on their faces. She was interested in conveying their natural beauty, often asking female sitters to let down their hair so as to show them in a way that they were not accustomed to presenting themselves. In addition to making stunning and evocative portraits both of male and female subjects, Cameron also staged tableaux and posed her sitters in situations that simulated allegorical paintings.

This photograph includes two of Cameron's most frequent models - her maid servant Mary Hillier representing St Cecilia (holding the portable organ), and Mary Ryan at the left. The composition fairly closely follows the figure group in Raphael's Sacra Conversazione (Santa Cecilia) in Bologna. The cult of Raphael was a major feature of High Victorian art in Britain and the works of Raphael were widely disseminated in photographic reproductions. This photograph was one of many works which entered the South Kensington Museum's collection (as purchases and gifts from Mrs Cameron) in 1865 and were shown among all the Museum's other art treasures that autumn.