The table linen at her home on the Isle of Wight was
Posted in General on 14. Oct, 2010
The table linen at her home on the Isle of Wight was streaked black from her mid-meal appearances straight from the darkroom, dripping prints in hand.The results were both pioneering and spectacular. With bold, cropped framings in soft and sharp focus, their chiaroscuro is modernist, almost abstract. As with the familiar portrait of Virginia Woolf’s mother, the artist’s niece Julia, they are like publicity shots to die for – unsurprising in that Cameron’s chosen themes are fame and beauty. Those of Mary Ryan, a real-life beggarmaid whom Cameron met on Putney Heath, actually led to a transformation, when a gentleman fell in love with, and married, the sitter.Other striking subjects include a saturnine, cinematic Iago, solemn yet sentimental madonnas, the bearded patriarchs Carlyle and Tennyson, and – most interesting but least discussed – young prince Alamayou of Ethiopia and unnamed Sri Lankan villagers.Both these books show how Cameron’s aspiration “to ennoble Photography and secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty” was realised, almost in despite of such pretension. “From life” was the note proudly added to many works, compelling respect for the actuality behind the artifice.Victoria Olsen’s biographical account is deftly written and well-crafted, using all the latest research and unpublished letters.
That by Colin Ford, curator of the new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, is more concise, differently informative, and contains full-page plates with almost the impact of the originals.Both authors defend Cameron’s storyline set-pieces, which have often been ridiculed for staginess: Sir Lancelot, Edward III and Queen Philippa in cardboard crowns, the Wise and Foolish Virgins all looking equally foolish. But they, too, are forerunners, like stills from silent movies, foreshadowing the whole feature-film genre, using real people and real props to create a naturalist illusion of imagined fantasy.Jan Marsh’s biography of D G Rossetti is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle
There is a room in the Capitoline Museum that is full of the heads of emperors. You walk in from the heat of a Roman morning, and there they are, 40 pairs of marble eyes, sneering coolly across the ages. The scary thing is how many of them look just as we expect – Caligula has calculating, brutal eyes; Heliogabalus is so achingly pretty, and mildly deranged. They are familiar because they haunt Europe’s imagination; they are our story of how absolute power corrodes the soul but gets to wear clean, white linen or golden armour along the way.
To be a European is to be descended from the people whom they beat into submission or who helped kick them when they were eventually down. It is to see the Romans as the builders of the continent’s first long-distance roads and the people who tortured their enemies to death on crosses; it is to marvel at a state that endured for a half-millennium and to be appalled at its corruption and fall.
Much of European history and culture comes from this split attitude: we want to be like the Romans and to be horribly warned against being like them.And to watch America, as its democracy falters and the ambitions of its rulers grow is to think of how, once before, a Republic lost its soul and became an Empire. To spare the conquered, and put down the proud, sounds like a very good idea. Somehow, though, it always ends in blood, and fire, and screaming. Maximus in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sums it up when he tells his men: “Unleash hell.” And they do.The best of the current crop of novels about Rome, its empire and its victims, is the most sensible and level-headed, in spite of its touches of infatuation with things Celtic Manda Scott’s earlier books are veterinary thrillers. What draws her to the ancient Britons in Dreaming the Eagle, the first of a sequence of novels about Boudica, is her sense of them as a people whose wealth and civilisation lay, in part, in their relationship with animals This sense is never sentimental and always tough-minded. The hounds and horses that preoccupy young Breaca and her brother Ban are real animals that snort and get sick, at once obstinate individuals and useful extensions of human will.For her Romans, animals are only tools, but then, so are people. This is an interesting historical novel because it deals with a clash of two very different senses of the sacred.
Scott is almost as good on the authoritarian, rational piety of the best of the Roman invaders as she is on the wild, intense spirituality of her Druids and women warriors. Significantly, the villain for her is not any of her Romans, not even the demented and capricious Caligula himself, so much as a British traitor: Amminios, one of the sons of Cymbeline, to whom nothing is sacred, and animals and men are just pieces to move around the chequerboard of his mind.It helps that, in a sometimes cluttered way, Scott has an intense visual sense. This redeems a writing style that is at best clear and precise, but never more interesting. She has a passion that is lacking, most of the time, from Norman Spinrad’s highly professional The Druid King, which does something similar for Vercingetorix and his struggle with Caesar.The conceit here is that the vision-haunted hero gradually realises that his destiny is to lose for the greater good – Gaul has to go down in order for it to become modern France, a millennium or two later.