# Sir John Herschel > Julia Margaret Cameron - April 1867 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/julia-margaret-cameron/cameron-sir-john-herschel/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-11 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Julia Margaret Cameron - **Date:** April 1867 - **Medium:** Albumen silver print from a wet collodion glass negative - **Dimensions:** Image 31.8 x 24.9 cm (12 1/2 x 9 13/16 in.); mount 39.9 x 32.9 cm (15 11/16 x 12 15/16 in.), corners clipped - **Object type:** Photograph - **Period:** British, nineteenth century - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Photographs - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **April 1867** Julia Margaret Cameron, maker `[documented]` (origin) Photographed at Herschel's home, Collingwood, near Hawkhurst, Kent. The Metropolitan Museum dates its print April 1867; related prints of the same pose carry an alternative Cameron-inscribed date of April 1869, discussed in the narrative and graded there as a separate, unresolved dispute rather than folded into this line. - **1867-c. 1977** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No ownership record for this specific print was found for the roughly one-hundred-year interval between the sitting and the print's appearance in the Gilman Paper Company Collection. This is recorded as an open gap rather than bridged with an assumed sale through Colnaghi or any other plausible but unsourced route. - **c. 1977-1998** Howard Gilman, chairman of the Gilman Paper Company, advised by Pierre Apraxine `[documented]` (collection formation) Assembled as part of the Gilman Paper Company Collection, formed over roughly two decades and widely regarded as the finest collection of photographs then in private hands. Gilman died in 1998. - **1998-2005** The Howard Gilman Foundation `[documented]` (custody after the collector's death) The collection remained with Gilman's foundation until its acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum was completed. - **2005-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (acquisition) Acquired as part of the roughly 8,500-object Gilman Collection in a combined purchase and gift arrangement, following seven years of negotiation and nine months of fundraising; the Museum sold duplicate or lower-priority material from the collection to help fund the purchase. This print's credit line, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Robert Rosenkranz Gift, 2005, records a purchase underwritten in part by a named donor's gift of funds. ## Open questions - Was there one sitting for this pose, in April 1867, with some later prints mistakenly or deliberately dated 1869; or two sittings, four years apart, producing near-identical results? Cox and Ford's catalogue raisonne records the conflict by cataloguing the two date-groups separately rather than resolving it. - How did the Metropolitan's specific print travel between Cameron's lifetime and its appearance in the Gilman Paper Company Collection, formed roughly a century later? No ownership record for that interval was found in the sources consulted. - Does the Metropolitan's print show the negative damage that a related print's 1873 inscription records? This would require direct physical or high-resolution comparison with the National Gallery of Victoria's print and was outside what this record could establish from published sources. - What price, if any, was separately allocated to this individual print within the Metropolitan's 2005 acquisition of the roughly 8,500-object Gilman Collection? Bulk collection acquisitions of this kind typically do not publish per-object prices, and none was found. - Was this specific print made by Cameron's own hand, by a household assistant under her direction, or through her dealer Colnaghi's studio? Cameron's working methods are documented in general terms; nothing found for this record identifies who physically produced this particular sheet of albumen paper. ## Sources - [1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record for Julia Margaret Cameron, 'Sir John Herschel,' April 1867, accession 2005.100.25 (Gilman Collection, Purchase, Robert Rosenkranz Gift, 2005). - [2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record for Julia Margaret Cameron, 'Sir John Herschel,' April 1867, accession 2013.1116 (The Rubel Collection, Gift of William Rubel, 2013). - [3] Victoria and Albert Museum, collection record for 'J.F.W. Herschel,' Julia Margaret Cameron, museum number 1144-1963, citing Julian Cox and Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (2003), catalogue no. 674. - [4] Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Photographic Society Collection, record for the Jamin portrait lens belonging to Julia Margaret Cameron, RPS.2467-2017. - [5] National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, collection record for 'Sir J.F.W. Herschel,' Julia Margaret Cameron, accession PH67-1977 (Felton Bequest, 1977). - [6] Bonhams, sale 11255, lot 20, 'Julia Margaret Cameron, J.F.W. Herschel, 1869,' London, 18 May 2004. - [7] Sotheby's, 'Age of Wonder,' New York, 9 December 2022, lot 1027, 'Julia Margaret Cameron, J.F.W. Herschel.' - [8] Victoria and Albert Museum, 'Julia Margaret Cameron's working methods.' - [9] Wikipedia, 'Julia Margaret Cameron,' for biographical dates, the Herschel friendship, the camera gift, the Photographic Society and South Kensington Museum purchases, exposure times, the Ceylon move and death, and the posthumous revival. Tertiary; flagged to be replaced with Julian Cox and Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Getty, 2003), or Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius (National Portrait Gallery, 2003). - [10] National Portrait Gallery, London, collection record for 'Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Bt,' NPG P213, for the passage from Cameron's Annals of My Glass House and the record of four exposures made at the sitting. - [11] Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release, 'Metropolitan Museum Acquires World-Renowned Collection of Photographs from The Howard Gilman Foundation,' 2005. - [12] Wikipedia, 'Gilman Paper Company collection.' Tertiary; flagged to be replaced with the Metropolitan's own acquisition file or Pierre Apraxine's published catalogue essays. - [13] R. Derek Wood, midley.co.uk, 'Julia Margaret Cameron's copyrighted photographs,' summarising the Stationers' Hall Copyright Entry Forms in Public Record Office class COPY 1, pieces 6-31. Verified 2026-08-11 via Wayback Machine snapshot (the live page is currently unreachable); used only for the checkable facts of the registration count and dates, not for any direct quotation. - [14] Art Institute of Chicago, collection record for Julia Margaret Cameron, 'Charles Darwin,' Alfred Stieglitz Collection reference 1949.881, for the circa 1868 negative date and 1875 print date. - [15] Wikimedia Commons, file information and extmetadata for the images used in this record's gallery, verified individually for LicenseShortName. - [16] Julia Margaret Cameron, 'Annals of My Glass House' (written c. 1874, first published 1889), full text as transcribed at infolio.es, for the exact wording of the artist quotation used in this record. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.