Walter Crane - Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Study for the Head of Dante

Simeon Solomon (1840—1905) was a British painter and illustrator, a member of a well-known family of artists. He was part of Rossetti's circle and a friend of Burne-Jones, and his work shows strong Pre-Raphaelite influence. In the 1860s he built up a reputation as an illustrator as well as a painter, but then sank into a life of idleness and dissipation (in 1873 he was convicted of homosexual offences and although he was let off lightly his career was ruined by the incident). His later years were spent in a pathetically bohemian existence, and he died of alcoholism.

The gift of the camera came to her in December 1863, at a moment when her husband was away, her sons were at boarding school, and her daughter had married and moved away. “From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour... it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.” wrote Cameron - forty-eight, a mother of six, deeply religious, well-read, eccentric friend of many of Victorian England’s greatest minds. “I began with no knowledge of the art... I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.” Cameron had no interest in establishing a commercial studio. Instead, she enlisted friends, family, and servants, costuming them. Within eighteen months she had sold eighty prints to the Victoria and Albert Museum, established a studio in two of its rooms, and made arrangements with the West End printseller to publish and sell her photographs. In a dozen years of work, effectively ended by the Camerons’ departure for Ceylon's family plantations in 1875, she produced about 900 mesmerizing works, that remain among the most highly admired of Victorian photographs.

William Blake Richmond lived up to his name: he was a precocious artist, gaining himself a place at the Royal Academy of Art when he was only fourteen years old. William Blake Richmond (1842–1921), The Mirror of Narcissus (1860), further details not known. Image by Gastair, via Wikimedia Commons. After only two years of study there, he painted The Mirror of Narcissus (1860). This shows an unusually feminine figure standing on a chaise admiring themself in the mirror.