The Museum’s unique presentation of the internationally touring exhibition Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron puts the photographer’s work in dialogue with European paintings. In Milwaukee, the exhibition features artworks from the Museum’s own collection to explore Cameron’s response to “old master” paintings, as well as work by her contemporaries.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) was part of intellectual and artistic circles in England that admired the detail, realism, and piety of the frescos by early Italian Renaissance artists such as Fra Angelico and Giotto. These wall paintings could not travel the world, but Cameron and others came to know them through reproductions.
American artist Timothy Cole, for example, created wood engravings of Giotto’s famous Arena Chapel murals, including a biblical scene of the meeting of the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, that Cameron specifically re-created in a photograph.
Cameron also looked to contemporaneous paintings for inspiration, and she influenced those artists in turn. Frederic Leighton’s At the Fountain (probably 1891–92), which usually hangs in gallery S200, on the second floor, will be on view in Arresting Beauty for the duration of the exhibition. Leighton was an acquaintance of Cameron’s, a close friend of her nephew’s, and an attendee of the famous salons hosted by her sister, which attracted Victorian artists, intellectuals, poets, and scientists. Cameron and Leighton were both associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which rejected what they saw as the muddy palettes and mundane subjects of Realist and Impressionist paintings. Instead, these artists sought beauty and elevated, spiritual subjects in art.
Learn more about Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron.
A V&A Exhibition – Touring the World
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Barbara Fuldner
The Milwaukee Art Museum extends its sincere thanks to the Visionaries.
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Murph Burke
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Image:
1. Julia Margaret Cameron, Mary Hillier, 1873. © The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund. Museum no. RPS.617-201
2. Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton of Stretton, At the Fountain, probably 1891–92. Layton Art Collection, Inc., Gift of Friends of Layton Art Gallery, L1895.1