3-100-777 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London"/Heritage Images

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (from life), 1865. Photogravure printed by H.H.H. Cameron and his partner J.C. Smith from negatives by Julia Margaret Cameron for the publication "Alfred, Lord Tennyson And His Friends". In the introduction, Cameron quotes from his mother's memoir "Annals of my Glasshouse". 'Meanwhile I took another immortal head, that of [Poet Laureate] Alfred Tennyson [1809-1892], and the result was that profile portrait which he himself designates as the Dirty Monk. It is a fit representation of Isaiah or of Jeremiah, and Sir Henry Taylor said the picture was as fine as Alfred Tennyson's finest poem.' In 1874 Tennyson asked Mrs Cameron to make illustrations for a popular edition of the "Idylls". However, when the book came to be published Mrs Cameron's large scale photographs had been replaced with small woodcuts. Undeterrred, later that year, she published at her own expense a further edition which illustrated, with albumen prints, incidents from Tennyson's "Idylls", the frontispiece of which was this photograph of Tennyson. From "A Series of 25 Portraits and Frontispiece In Photogravure From The Negatives Of Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron And H.H.H. Cameron Reminiscences By Anne Thackeray Ritchie With Introduction By H.H. Hay Cameron" - [London: 1893]