Henry Herschel Hay Cameron (1852 - 1911)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

Photographer. Son of Julia Margaret Cameron.

Henry Hay Herschel Cameron was named after his mother’s friends, Henry Taylor and Sir John Herschel. In her manuscript Annals of my Glass House, 1874, Mrs Cameron describes her youngest son as a ‘very remarkable photographer’. Mrs Cameron may well have encouraged Henry’s photography to offset his ambitions to become an actor, which was causing her some anxiety. After his mother’s death in 1879, Henry left Ceylon where he had been managing the Glencairn estate and returned to Britain. A founder member of the ‘Linked Ring’, from c.1886 to c.1902 he ran a photographic studio, which specialised in portraiture, at addresses in Mortimer Street, Marylebone and Hanover Square, Westrminster and finally in Brompton Road, Knightsbridge. Aside from his mother’s friendship with Watts, Henry’s relationship seems to have continued on a professional basis as a photographer, in that Watts seems to have used Cameron’s studio to photograph a number of paintings, some of which were badly damaged in a studio fire in 1899.

Although active as a photographer, Henry retained his interest in the theatre and in the latter years of his life, had a number of small roles.