St. Agnes

This photograph shows one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s housemaids, Mary Anne Hillier (1845-1936). She is posed to illustrate the religious legend of St Agnes Eve, which tells of the evening that virgins dream of their future husbands.

The British poet John Keats (1795-1821) wrote in his poem ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1820):

They told her how, upon St Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright
As supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white
Nor Look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

Cameron’s close friend and neighbour, Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), also wrote a poem about St Agnes Eve, in which St Agnes proclaims ‘For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits, To make me pure of sin’, indicating a sacred union with Christ. Cameron was staunchly Christian and the expression of religious faith and divine iconography is one of the main preoccupations of her photography. The subject also indicates her interest in literary illustration. She made another photograph from the sitting, also called St Agnes, in which Hillier appears in the same costume and pose but with her eyes averted downwards in prayer.

Hillier was one of Cameron’s favourite models and appeared so frequently in the guise of Madonna that she was known as ‘Mary Madonna’. In her biographical statement Annals of my Glass House, Cameron wrote that Hillier ‘has been one of the most beautiful and constant of my models, and in every manner of form has her face been reproduced, yet never has it been felt that the grace of the fashion of it has perished…The very unusual attributes of her character and complexion of her mind…are the wonder of those whose life is blended with ours as intimate friends of the house.’