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The photographs:
Famous Men and Fair Women
Julia Margaret CAMERON
British, 1815–79
A study for the Cenci (Kate Keown), 1868
albumen silver photograph
27.0 x 35.2cm
The Wilson Centre for Photography
93:4853
Beatrice Cenci was a legendary Roman heroine whose tragic story fired the
imagination of nineteenth century artists, writers and public alike. A
portrait of Beatrice, once attributed to Guido Reni (now unattributed) is in
the National Gallery, Rome. Paul Delaroche, the French Romantic painter, also
depicted Beatrice. Lord Byron wrote on the theme; Percy Shelley's poetic
drama The Cenci, written in 1819, was reprinted in the mid-nineteenth
century; and Nathaniel Hawthorne retold the Beatrice story in his 1860 novel
The Marble Faun.
Julia Margaret Cameron was clearly intrigued by the Cenci
legend as she photographed one other variant of this study with Kate Keown and
another with her niece, May Prinsep as model.
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