Portrait of a portraitist from the mists of time
Final resting place: The Camerons’ grave at St Mary’s Church Bogawantalawa
St. Mary’s Church in Bogawantalawa lies huddled against the upcountry mist, a cosy little retreat against the dark cold weather of the hills, with glowing stained glass.
Here in its graveyard are the graves of many Britons who lived and worked for the empire, but the most resonant name of all would be Julia Margaret Cameron. A couple of small gravestones joined by a Celtic cross (given Julia’s love for Arthurian times) commemorate the best known portraitist of the 19th Century and her husband who loved Ceylon.
It is here we must linger first in this story, for it was where the germ of the idea for Dr. Martin Pieris’ and Ismeth Raheem’s new film, From Isle of Wight to Ceylon, was first planted amidst the quaint aura of a little Anglican church in the hill country.
“I am the greatest photographer of all time”: Julia Margaret Cameron
The beautiful 15-minute short film looking at Julia’s three years (her last) from 1875 to 1879 spent in Ceylon in plantations in Kalutara, Glencairn and Bogawantalawa, is a sepia and black and white evocation of British Ceylon and those ‘mystery years’ when Julia the upper class ‘visionary’ (closer to the old sense of the word of seeing ‘visions’), did comparatively little photographic work.
Martin, himself a photographer, says this film is what Carl Muller would have called ‘faction’ – fiction based on fact.
Narrated by Martin’s wife Sue Scott, it imagines Margaret coming back from the grave and mulling over the three years.
Traditional snake charmers: One of Julia’s pictures featured in the film
Martin, a Sri Lankan who emigrated to Australia half a century ago, worked with Ismeth who, ever encyclopaedic, shook his locks at the biographies written on the Ceylon years of Julia’s life, often riddled with ridiculous details like the Camerons walking from Kalutara to Bogawantalawa over one breezy evening – details overlooked in blithe unconcern for the ‘backwoods’ of the empire.
While best known for her portraits of famous men like Darwin and Tennyson, and those inspired by legends, religious themes, and literature, Julia’s photos had a spiritual glow.
After childhood and marriage in Calcutta, Julia with husband Charles Hay Cameron came to London, then later Isle of Wight, to the seaside village of Freshwater. Till 1875 (when the Ceylon years begin) she lived in Freshwater.
Julia’s picture of husband Charles Cameron as King Lear
Margaret’s antecedents are impeccably noble and Ismeth says Charles (of the Colebrooke- Cameron Commission) grandson to the Earl of Errol, bought thousands of acres in Ceylon for just ninety shillings.
Having turned down the governorship of Ceylon he later posed for her photos as King Lear and in other venerable roles.
Martin says that many flukes conspired to make Julia’s Ceylon years patchy in terms of portraits: she was ‘violently’ ill for the first few months in coffee blossom country; she was not photographing ‘peers’ or friends as in England but servants and labourers (to whom she could not convey her specific needs); it was difficult to have dark rooms and other facilities and she had no ‘stories’ for Ceylon as she did in her own island of Albion.
Ismeth however, does not agree that Julia’s Ceylon oeuvre was sketchy and points out that Marianne North, her botanical painter friend, recalls portraits “covering every inch of the walls, floors, settees, tables, chairs” in Kalutara: Tamil girls with heavy jewellery, snake charmers and Sinhalese ladies in chaste white jackets.
Before they came to Ceylon, Julia knew the East intimately as an Anglo-Indian deb and used to wear Indian silks and shawls. It was aged 48 she began photography (the camera was a gift from her daughter).
The woman who emerges from the film is a somewhat melancholy genius acutely aware of her brilliance; not unlike her great-niece Virginia Woolf who was obsessed with her great-aunt due to obvious reasons though one was dead before the other was born.
She believed ardently in herself and was a great ‘self-promoter’, says Martin, quoting a letter written to the Victoria & Albert Museum, slashed with unabashed phrases like “you should be honoured to have my portraits” and even “I am the greatest photographer of all time”.
Upper class confidence mixed with a need for money – for according to some accounts the Camerons wanted for the ‘mint sauce’ despite Charles’s ‘fabulous’ wealth and positively ‘undulating’ estates.
The film captures early British Ceylon – fishermen with cormorants and egrets, bullock carts, panoramas of rural villages, tea estates and dense jungle, against the world of the British Julia – Shakespearean or Tennysonian images, portraits of men that ooze character and those of women capturing a fragile elusive beauty.
Ismeth had a rather disheartening time trying to track down some of the Ceylon portraits supposedly given to the Colombo Museum. They remain lost in some limbo; each at least worth some 50,000 dollars. Only 29 are currently known from Ceylon in contrast to around 900 done in England.
‘Ceylon’ was engraved in the hearts of the Camerons. Not only was their property in the Isle of Wight before arriving in Ceylon (next door to Alfred Lord Tennyson) called ‘Dimbola’ (after Dimbulla estate that Charles had bought), but it was only here in Ceylon that he felt he could be truly happy.
Both Ismeth and Martin did an enormous amount of research for the film, with Ismeth visiting the Isle of Wight and other locations and Martin putting himself assiduously in Julia’s (rather capacious) shoes as a fellow photographer, albeit, he admits, today in a much more easier world for the kind of portraits Julia did required extraordinary patience, with exposures of 7 to 15 minutes where sitters had to stay unblinkingly still.
While the film relies on images by Julia and pictures of Ceylon, Martin did reenact her funeral with “six white Brahmin bulls” drawing the cart to church. The tombstone and ebony coffin of (the real) obsequies were from England brought when they came over. Charles died after his wife in 1881.
In St. Mary’s Bogawantalawa (no longer alas in the spruce condition of British times) can still be seen three stained glass windows donated by the Camerons. Ismeth and Martin stress that this final link with the illustrious Camerons in Ceylon should be preserved.
From Isle of Wight to Ceylon will be premiered at the Lionel Wendt on Friday, September 9 at 6.30 p.m together with the short film The Song of Lanka, also by Martin Pieris.
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