Julia Margaret Cameron, "the greatest pictorial photographer of the 19th Century" was born in Calcutta on June 15th 1815. Educated in Europe, she returned to Calcutta to marry Charles Hay Cameron, and to help him to England, where Julia became part of the artistic community based around her sister's home, Little Holland House, Kensington. Other prime movers included the poet Henry Taylor and the painter G. F. Watts, and guests included the Pre-Raphaelites, Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Julia became a close friend of the Tennysons, often visiting them at Farringford, and in 1860 bought two adjacent cottages in Terrace Lane, Freshwater Bay from Jacob Long, a local fisherman. She linked these together with a central tower - in the fashionable "Gothic" style - and named the new building Dimbola, after the family tea estates in Sri Lanka.

Julia endeared herself to the locals, with her generosity and enthusiasm for the arts. Following the chance gift of a camera in 1863, she enthusiastically took up this new art form, still then in its infancy.

Within a year she had begun to present her friends with albums of her work, and was elected a member of the Photographic Society in London. It was at Dimbola Lodge that the greatest of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs were taken. She herself recorded how she set up her studio, access to which was through the present tea rooms.

"I turned my coal-house into my dark room and a glazed fowl house I had given to my children became my glass house . . . the society of hens and chickens was soon changed for that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalised this humble little farm erection".

Even now, Dimbola dominates the skyline of the Bay. In this house, Cameron herself welcomed as an equal - and photographed - the leaders of the Victorian intellectual world. Tennyson and G.F. Watts lived locally; visitors included Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Holman Hunt, William and Helen Allingham, Palgrave, Ellen Terry, Leslie Stephen, Gilbert and Sullivan, Benjamin Jowett and the American poet Longfellow.

Julia's lens captured forever a whole society, the master gunner's children as well as great poets, her own serving maids as well as lords and prime ministers. Julia responded to something very local to Dimbola - the clarity of light and mystical aura of Freshwater Bay - and thus made it universal.

"I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me . . . its difficulty enhanced the value of the pursuit. The peasantry of our Island is very handsome. From the men, the women, the maidens and the children I have had very loyal subjects, as all the patrons of my photography know".

The coal-house survives, even if it is now incorporated into a residential flat. Many of the original features which obtrude into Cameron’s photographs still exist.

Wilfred Ward, son of the theologian, considered that: “The Freshwater society of those days approached nearer to realising the purpose and ideal of a French salon more than any other social group in England. We had our Chateaubriand in Tennyson and our Madame le Recamier in Mrs Cameron. The essential work of gathering together the interesting people who were to form the Tennyson society, the enthusiasm for the hero and for genius in general, was Mrs Cameron’s.”

Although Cameron’s photography was the subject of great amusement among some of her contemporaries, her role as a pioneer of perhaps the most important art form of the Twentieth Century has been seen as increasingly significant.

A touring exhibition of her work in 1984, arranged by Dr Mike Weaver for the John Hansard Gallery of Southampton University, visited Bonn, Paris, Madrid and New York. Since then her work has attracted increasing academic scrutiny and public interest. Barely a year now goes by without a major exhibition of Julia’s work somewhere in the world.

Freshwater Bay itself has continued to attract literary pilgrims (literally) in the footsteps of Tennyson and Cameron. Auden and Isherwood spent a summer in Coastguard Lane, D H Lawrence’s novel ‘The Trespasser’ evokes the sultry summer of 1909 at Freshwater Bay, T S Elliot came here on his second honeymoon, and John Betjeman made visits to Farringford, often with a film crew.

A programme on BBC2 in the series ‘Eminent Victorians’, again traced the Freshwater Bay artistic world of a century ago, including shots of ‘Dimbola’ and ‘Cameron House’ and the ‘Tennyson Gate’ through which the poet would enter the grounds of Dimbola Lodge, virtually in secret. Now marked by a commemorative plaque, this gate is still in good repair. Many other TV programmes have followed suit, including Blue Peter and Meridian’s Antiques Trail, all adding to the knowledge worldwide of Dimbola.

J B Priestley described best the atmosphere of the West Wight, as a kind of creative indolence: “I remember Neville Cardus staying with us on a bright summer weekend, and after a few hours of it saying slowly to me, ‘It’s like a dream’.”

Just such a sense of intense stillness is caught by Cameron’s lens; her photographs are timeless precisely because time is not pressing, because her subjects are in no hurry whatsoever, and can therefore examine their own souls.

The purchase, after a public appeal, of the Herschel album with Colin Ford’s subsequent and monumental study; the touring exhibition in 1984 – organised by Southampton University’s John Hansard Gallery; the enormous retrospective exhibition at Stanford University; the growing number of books on Cameron’s life and art - all are signs of Mrs Cameron’s full artistic measure.

As Thackeray’s granddaughter was to write: “To us who live at Freshwater, every stone has significance, every green lane and path association. Great men cast a benediction upon the place where they lived, and Freshwater is hallowed ground.”

It is that rich heritage that we on the Isle of Wight are determined to preserve.

Dr Brian Hinton

The house where Julia Margaret Cameron took up photography, and where the majority of her masterpieces were taken, still stands; a rare, perhaps unique, survival.

Colin Ford – Director, Museum & Galleries of Wales

2001