The J. Paul Getty Museum

Object Description

Within a month of “her very first success”—a portrait of Annie Philpot—Cameron had created a presentation album for her close friend, the painter George Frederick Watts (1817-1904). The album (now at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York), inscribed to Watts and dated February 22, 1864, contains thirty-nine of Cameron’s earliest photographs. It was some time very close to this date that she created the negative for Sadness, a study of Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928).

Terry came from a theatrical family and had her stage debut at age nine. In 1862 she was introduced to Watts, who painted a double portrait of her with her elder sister Kate. In a union engineered by Cameron and her own sisters, Terry and Watts were married on February 20, 1864, when she was just sixteen. Within a year the couple had separated; they were formally divorced in 1877.

The pair spent their honeymoon at Freshwater, and most likely it was at this time that the portrait was made. While the possibility exists that Terry, as an actress, was striking a pose for Cameron, the picture’s title suggests the realization of a mismatched marriage. Terry’s anxiety is plainly evident—she leans against an interior wall and tugs nervously at her necklace. The lighting is notably subdued, leaving her face shadowed in doubt. In The Story of My Life (1909), Terry recalls how demanding Watts was, calling upon her to sit for hours as a model and giving her strict orders not to speak in front of distinguished guests in his studio.

Cameron’s uncertain technique is evidenced by the image loss at the lower center of the picture, where the collodion emulsion peeled away from the glass-plate negative. She must have created only a single negative at this sitting, since she presented this particular print as is in the Overstone Album. The negative was later rephotographed (with the damage repaired) and distributed commercially as a carbon print by the Autotype Company of London (see 86.XM.636.1). This later version was also reproduced in 1913 in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camerawork.