Cleveland Museum of Art

Julia Jackson Duckworth (1846-1895)

Julia Margaret Cameron

Date

1874

Medium

albumen print from wet collodion negative

Culture

England, 19th century

Department

Photography

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

One of the renowned beauties of Victorian England, Jackson is seen in the two photographs to the left the year she married barrister Herbert Duckworth at age 21. He died three years later, leaving her with two children and a third on the way. She is seen here at age 28, a Victorian tragic heroine haunted by grief. Pale and hollow-eyed, although still lovely, she stands before a wall of ivy, an evergreen plant that signified eternity and fidelity. Four years later, Duckworth married biographer Sir Leslie Stephen with whom she had four children, including author Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell. Julia Jackson Duckworth Stephen died of rheumatic fever in 1895 at age 49.

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