She quickly produced a large body of portraits, and created allegorical images inspired by tableaux vivants, theatre, 15th-century Italian painters, and contemporary artists.

[5] Adeline's mother was a French aristocrat and the daughter of Chevalier Ambrose Pierre Antoine de l'Etang, who had been a page to Marie Antoinette and an officer in the Garde du Corps of King Louis XVI.

Julia and six of her sisters[1][3] survived into adulthood,[b] inheriting some Bengali blood through their maternal grandmother, Thérèse Josephe Blin de Grincourt.

Sara (Sarah) married Sir Henry Thoby Prinsep, a director of the East India Company, and made their home at Little Holland House in Kensington, which became an important intellectual centre.

[10] She also met Charles Hay Cameron, twenty years her senior and a reformer of Indian law and education who later invested in coffee plantations in what is now Sri Lanka.

It's a nest of proraphaelites, where Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Watts, Leighton etc, Tennyson, the Brownings and Thackeray etc and tutti quanti receive dinners and incense, and cups of tea handed to them by these women almost kneeling.

[3][12] A private gate connected the residences and the two families soon started entertaining famous people with music, poetry readings, and amateur plays, creating an artistic scene similar to Little Holland House.

The profit of my boys upon new laid eggs was stopped, and all hands and hearts sympathised in my new labour, since the society of hens and chickens was soon changed for that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalized the humble little farm erection.

Although never making commissioned portraits or establishing a commercial studio, she thought of her photographic activity as a professional endeavour, copyrighting, publishing, and marketing her work.

Cameron wrote: "My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause.

[4] Her elaborate illustrative tableaux involving religious, literary, and classical figures peaked in a series of images for Tennyson's Idylls of the King, published in 1874 and 1875, evidently at her expense.

Her pretty maids, her scholars, her poets, her philosophers, astronomers, and divines, all those men of genius who came and sat willingly to her while in a fever of artistic emotion she plied the instruments of her art, – they have all gone, and silence is the only tenant left at Dimbola.

[8]: 483  The botanical painter and biologist Marianne North recounted a visit to Cameron in Ceylon:The walls of the room were covered with magnificent photographs; others were tumbling about the tables, chairs, and floors with quantities of damp books, all untidy and picturesque; the lady herself with a lace veil on her head and flowing draperies.

[8]: 46  Cameron's style of close-up portraits resembling Titian may well have been learned from Wynfield, since she took a lesson from him and later wrote "I consult him in correspondence whenever I am in difficulty".

"[21][22] Cameron's portraits are partly the product of her intimacy and regard for the subject, but also intend to capture "particular qualities or essences—typically, genius in men and beauty in women".

[3] Mike Weaver, a scholar who wrote about Cameron's photography in work published in 1984, framed her idea of genius and beauty "within a specifically Christian framework, as indicative of the sublime and the sacred".

[8]: 175  To Thomas Carlyle, Cameron wrote "When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.

[8]: 291  Cameron turned to Old Master paintings and the contemporary idea —based in phrenology— of the ideal "type" to capture the greatness that she perceived in these eminent Victorian individuals.

Many of her images of young women obscure their individuality and represent their identity as multifaceted and changeable[8]: 68  by showing them "in pairs, or reflected in a mirror... frequently expressive of a deep ambiguity and anxiety.

[8]: 129 Cameron took literature as inspiration, representing characters from Shakespeare, Elizabethan poems, novels, plays, and the work of her contemporaries: Tennyson, Henry Taylor, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, and George Eliot.

[2]The Photographic News echoed this sentiment: What in the name of all the nitrate of silver that ever turned white into black have these pictures in common with good photography?

We cannot but think that this lady's highly imaginative and artistic efforts might be supplemented by the judicious employment of a small boy with a wash leather, and a lens screwed a trifle less out of accurate definition.

[8]: 54 The Illustrated London News provided an alternative perspective, writing that her images were "the nearest approach to art, or rather the most bold and successful applications of the principles of fine-art to photography".

A few years later, George Bernard Shaw reviewed a posthumous exhibition of Cameron's, writing:While the portraits of Herschel, Tennyson and Carlyle beat hollow anything I have ever seen, right on the same wall, and virtually in the same frame, there are photographs of children with no clothes on, or else the underclothes by way of propriety, with palpably paper wings, most inartistically grouped and artlessly labelled as angels, saints or fairies.

Helmut Gernsheim, after seeing photographs that Cameron had donated hanging in the waiting room of a Hampshire railway station, published a book on her work that helped re-establish her reputation.

[3][29] Gernsheim's review echoed the sentiments of Shaw and Fry, criticising her allegorical and illustrative photos while praising her portraits:If the majority of Mrs. Cameron's subject pictures seem to us affected, ludicrous and amateurish, and appear in our opinion to be failures, how masterly, on the other hand, are her straightforward, truthful portraits, which are entirely free from false sentiment, and which compensate for the errors of taste in her studies.

Her contemporaries decorated books of poetry by Burns, Gray, Milton, Scott, Shakespeare and others with picturesque landscapes, occasionally peopling these with attractively disposed figures in the scenery, but rarely illustrating actual characters or incidents from the story.

She aimed for neither the finish and formalized poses common in the commercial portrait studios, nor for the elaborate narratives of other Victorian "high art" photographers such as H. P. Robinson and O. G.

[2]Janet Malcolm, in "The Genius of the Glass House" writes that "Cameron's compositions have more connection to the family album pictures of recalcitrant relatives who have been herded together for the obligatory group picture than they do to the masterpieces of Western painting" but that "The beauty that Cameron found, and in a surprising number of cases was able to arrest, among the aging and aged men of the Victorian literary and art establishment is a cornerstone of her achievement".

[35] Retrospective exhibitions include: 10 March 1974 25 May 1986 3 May 1998 26 May 2003 30 August 2003 25 October 2015 19 September 2016 20 May 2018 Distributed by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art