Sappho is Cameron’s formal title for this portrait study, a reference to the elusive Greek poet of the 6th century B. C., a poet known only in fragments of writing and very little of whose work survives. She has been celebrated over the centuries for her verses in praise of love, especially love between women, although the nature of that love remains ambiguous. In mid-19th-century England, when this photograph was made, Sappho was fashionable as a symbol of the ancient Greco-Roman world and inspired both authors and painters. Cameron’s good friend, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, used her lines as a source for some of his own poems, among them “Midnight,” “Eleanora,” and “Mariana.”
The sitter in the present photograph is Cameron’s young parlor maid, Mary Hillier, described by Cameron in her autobiographical Annals of My Glass House as “one of the most beautiful and constant of my models.” Cameron photographed Hillier for over a decade in a variety of roles, among them the Madonna, the goddess Psyche, and the virgin martyr St. Agnes. In the image offered here, Hillier is probably holding a lyre, signifying poetry and music, although the prop is off-camera; in a variant study (Cox 254), made at the same time, a portion of the lyre is visible.
The glass negative for this portrait was likely broken or damaged early on, for the only prints that survive show evidence of cracks or breaks in the plate, as in the present lot. Other prints of the image in this state are in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It can be assumed that Cameron preferred prints from this negative, even with its flaws, to the more prosaic variant, of which only one print has been located.