Sir John Herschel

A close, soft-focus head-and-shoulders portrait of the astronomer and chemist Sir John Herschel, made by Julia Margaret Cameron at his home in Kent and inscribed by her as April 1867. It is one of at least half a dozen surviving prints of this sitting, now scattered across the Metropolitan Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, and private collections, and no two of them are quite the same object.

Some are dated 1867, some 1869, on Cameron's own handwriting; the standard catalogue lists the two groups as different entries. One surviving print carries an inscription, added six years after the sitting, noting that the glass negative was by then damaged. Cameron scratched into negatives, printed from cracked glass, and let her sons and dealers circulate the results under her name and copyright, which is exactly the kind of practice that turns a single famous image into a population of individually contestable objects. This page is about the Metropolitan's print specifically, and about what can and cannot be said to distinguish it from its siblings.

What the object is

An albumen silver print, image 31.8 by 24.9 centimetres, laid on a larger mount, 39.9 by 32.9 centimetres, whose corners have been clipped. It shows the head and upper shoulders of an elderly man with a mass of unruly white hair and beard, lit from one side, emerging from an undifferentiated dark ground. There is no armchair, no book, no instrument, nothing that a conventional studio portraitist of 1867 would have used to signal that the sitter was a scientist. The image is close enough, and soft enough in focus, that the effect is closer to an apparition than a record.

The sitter is Sir John Frederick William Herschel, astronomer, chemist and mathematician, son of the astronomer William Herschel, then in his mid-seventies and in the last years of his life; he died in 1871. Cameron photographed him at his home, Collingwood, near Hawkhurst in Kent, where she went specifically to make his portrait. The print now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of several known prints of this exact pose from this sitting, and this record is about that print: what is documented about it, what is only documented about its siblings, and where the two are at risk of being confused.

The sitter, and why Cameron wanted him

Cameron and Herschel had known each other since 1835, when she convalesced near him at the Cape of Good Hope. He told her about the invention of photography in 1839, within months of its announcement in London and Paris, and in 1842 he sent her some of the first photographic images she ever saw, calotypes and daguerreotypes, years before she owned a camera herself. He stood godfather to her first child. By the time she photographed him in 1867 the friendship was, in her own count, thirty-one years old.

Cameron's own description of the sitting survives in her short memoir Annals of My Glass House, written not long before her death and first published posthumously. She did not treat this as a routine commission. Herschel was, to her, a teacher, and the portrait was conceived as an act of record for the nation, not a private keepsake. The full passage is used below as this record's artist quotation, because it states in her own words what she thought she was doing when she made this photograph, as distinct from what any modern reading of the image might supply.

The choice of sitter also carries a specific irony worth stating plainly rather than treating as a coincidence: Herschel is credited with coining the English words 'photography,' 'negative,' 'positive' and 'snapshot,' and with describing the fixing process that made a photographic image permanent. Cameron photographed, with a technique he had helped name, the man who named the technique.

How the sitting and the print were made

Cameron worked in the wet collodion process on glass negatives of roughly 12 by 10 inches at this date, moving to a 15 by 12 inch format later in her career. The plate had to be coated, sensitised, exposed and developed while still wet, which meant the darkroom, a converted coal-house and glazed henhouse at her home on the Isle of Wight, had to be within a few minutes' reach of the camera; on location at Collingwood, that logistics problem had to be solved on Herschel's own property. Exposures at this period commonly ran three to seven minutes, long enough that any small movement by the sitter registered as blur.

Her first lens, from the Paris maker Jamin, was a Petzval-type portrait lens with a fixed aperture of about f/3.6 and pronounced chromatic aberration; an example belonging to her, given to the Royal Photographic Society by the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, now survives in the V&A's Royal Photographic Society Collection. That aberration, combined with her habit of working close to the lens's minimum focus distance and declining to stop it down for greater depth of field, is the optical explanation usually given for the soft, non-photographic quality contemporary critics objected to and that this print exhibits.

By her own account, and by the account of visitors, Cameron prepared her sitters physically for the image she wanted rather than simply pointing a camera at them as she found them. Herschel is reported to have washed and tousled his white hair before the sitting so that it would catch the light exactly as it appears in the print, an unusually active piece of direction for a Victorian portrait sitting of an eminent man by an amateur.

Two dates for one photograph

This is the central problem this record exists to state clearly. Prints of this same pose, at very close to this same size, survive with two different dates written on them in what is, in both cases, presented as Cameron's own hand.

The Metropolitan's print, the Victoria and Albert Museum's print (museum number 1144-1963), and a print sold at Sotheby's in London on 9 December 2022 (lot 1027, from the Age of Wonder sale) are each dated April 1867. The National Gallery of Victoria's print (accession PH67-1977) and a print sold at Bonhams in London on 18 May 2004 (lot 20) are each inscribed as taken 'at his own residence Collingwood' in 1869. Julian Cox and Colin Ford's 2003 catalogue raisonne, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, treats these as two separate catalogue entries, 674 for the 1867 group and 675 for the 1869 group, rather than resolving them to a single date.

What that means in practice is that the standard reference on Cameron's work does not claim to know whether Herschel sat for this composition once, in 1867, with a small number of later prints mistakenly or deliberately dated two years on; or twice, in a near-identical pose four years apart, on each occasion producing a small edition of prints. Either is possible from a woman who scratched corrections directly into her negatives and inscribed mounts, by her own admission, well after the fact. This record follows the Metropolitan's own cataloguing and dates its print April 1867, while stating that the wider print population carries a genuine, unresolved dating conflict that a reader comparing prints across institutions needs to know about before assuming any two copies are interchangeable.

The inscription that dates the damage

The National Gallery of Victoria's 1869-dated print carries a second inscription, in addition to the sitting date, added later still: a note stating that the picture is 'a National portrait of inestimable value as the negative glass is now injured,' dated 1873 in Cameron's hand. The same mount also records that the print was given to a named recipient (recorded by the museum as '(...) Hollis') as a gift from Cameron.

Two things follow from this, and it is worth separating them. First, it is direct, dated, primary evidence that Cameron continued to write on mounts of this image years after any of the sittings under discussion, which is exactly the practice that makes dating any single undated print from style alone unsafe. Second, it establishes that the glass negative for this composition was already damaged by 1873, which means that any print that can be shown to derive from a flawed impression of the negative was made from 1873 onward at the earliest. Cameron is independently documented as having printed from cracked and broken negatives rather than discarding them, so a damage-based print made after 1873 would not necessarily read as a rejected or lesser copy in her own practice.

No condition report or high-resolution negative-flaw comparison for the Metropolitan's print was located in the sources consulted for this record, so this record does not claim to know whether the Metropolitan's print shows or lacks the 1873 damage. That is exactly the kind of physical, comparative examination a specialist with the print in hand, not a documentary record built from published catalogue descriptions, would be needed to settle.

No two prints alike

Beyond the date written on the mount, the surviving prints of this composition differ from each other physically in ways ordinary to Cameron's practice and easy to miss if a reader assumes 'the Herschel photograph' names one fixed object. The Metropolitan's own print measures 31.8 by 24.9 centimetres. The Victoria and Albert's measures 32.1 by 24.2 centimetres on a smaller mount. The National Gallery of Victoria's measures 32.4 by 23.8 centimetres. The Bonhams print measured 35.5 by 27 centimetres. The Sotheby's 2022 print measured 33 by 25.7 centimetres. A second print of the same date held by the Metropolitan itself, from the Rubel Collection (accession 2013.1116), is mounted on a sheet of 55.3 by 45.1 centimetres, much larger than any of the others.

None of these differences is large enough to suggest a different negative was used for most of them; they are consistent with Cameron and her printers hand-trimming albumen paper around a single negative's image with no fixed template, then mounting the results on whatever card was to hand or judged appropriate for the recipient or buyer, sometimes plain and sometimes on the ruled and blindstamped mounts she used for sale through her dealer. The Rubel print's unusually large mount is the one outlier worth flagging on its own terms: a reader assuming a Cameron carte or cabinet-sized mount as standard would be wrong for that print specifically.

Registering copyright, selling through Colnaghi

Cameron treated her photography as a business as well as an art, and the paper trail from that business is part of what makes prints like this one identifiable at all. Starting in 1864, the year she took up the camera, she began registering individual photographs for copyright at the Copyright Office at Stationers' Hall in London, a legal step most contemporary amateur and even most professional photographers did not bother with. Over roughly eleven and a half years, to October 1875, she registered 508 of her photographs this way; the surviving Copyright Entry Forms, held in the Public Record Office's COPY 1 class, show her signing them personally only in 1864 and 1865, after which an agent, recorded as Edward Stowell, signed on her behalf for more than four years.

From her first year she also arranged for prints to be sold through the London art dealers P. and D. Colnaghi, and the Colnaghi blindstamp appears on several of the surviving Herschel mounts, including the 1867-dated Sotheby's print and the 1869-dated Bonhams and National Gallery of Victoria prints. She is also recorded as sending signed mounts directly to sitters, Herschel among them, specifically to raise a print's resale desirability, an unusually candid piece of evidence that Cameron thought about her photographs as saleable commercial objects and not only as private tributes to friends.

Critical reception at the time

The soft focus and visible imperfection that give this print its character were not accidental limitations that Victorian critics excused; they were the single most contested feature of Cameron's work while she was alive. The Photographic Journal, reviewing her work in 1865, dismissed it as smudged, torn, dirty and undefined, a judgement aimed squarely at the kind of chromatic blur and shallow focus produced by her Jamin lens. The Illustrated London News took the opposite position, praising her images as the nearest approach photography had made to fine art.

Cameron's own framing of the dispute, recorded in Annals of My Glass House, was that she aimed to capture the inner character of a sitter rather than a mechanically sharp record of his features, and that she measured her portraits of eminent men against the example of painters such as Titian and Raphael rather than against the technical standard of the commercial photographic trade. Whatever the merits of that position in 1867, it is the reason a portrait of a scientist carries no scientific attributes at all: Cameron was not illustrating what Herschel had discovered, she was trying to picture what kind of man she believed had discovered it.

From Cameron's hands to the Gilman Collection

Documented provenance for the Metropolitan's specific print begins again only in the late twentieth century. It was one of more than 8,500 photographs assembled between roughly 1977 and 1997 by Howard Gilman, chairman of the Gilman Paper Company, working with the art historian Pierre Apraxine as his adviser; the resulting Gilman Paper Company Collection was, by the time it was finished, widely regarded as the finest collection of photographs in private hands anywhere. Gilman died in 1998, after which the collection was held by the Howard Gilman Foundation.

In 2005, after seven years of negotiation and nine months of fundraising, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the collection in a combined purchase and gift arrangement, with the Museum able to deaccession and sell duplicate or lower-priority material to help fund the purchase. The Metropolitan's credit line for this print, 'Gilman Collection, Purchase, Robert Rosenkranz Gift, 2005,' records that mechanism: it is a purchase, underwritten in part by a named donor's gift of funds, rather than an outright donation of the object itself.

How the print reached the market that fed the Gilman Collection between Cameron's death in 1879 and the collection's formation a century later is not documented in the sources consulted for this record. That gap, of roughly a hundred years, is recorded here as unknown rather than filled with a plausible-sounding but unsourced chain of ownership.

The market for Cameron's Herschel, and what it is not evidence of

Because the Gilman Collection reached the Metropolitan as a bulk acquisition rather than a single lot at public auction, this print itself has no individual hammer price or premium to report, and none is invented here. What auction evidence exists concerns different physical prints of the same composition and needs to be read as exactly that, evidence about the market for this image in general, not a price history for this object.

The 1869-dated print with the Colnaghi blindstamp and the inscription naming a Mr. Charles Hogan as an earlier recipient was offered at Bonhams in London on 18 May 2004 (lot 20) with an estimate of 2,000 to 3,000 pounds sterling; the price realised was not available in the auction record consulted. A 1867-dated print, also Colnaghi blindstamped and possibly bearing an ink autograph of Herschel himself, was offered at Sotheby's New York on 9 December 2022 as part of the Age of Wonder sale (lot 1027) with an estimate of 30,000 to 50,000 US dollars; the hammer price was behind a login wall not accessed for this record. Both figures are given here only to establish that individual prints of this sitting do circulate and sell, and roughly at what level, not as a valuation of the Metropolitan's own print.