Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta in 1815 but lived mostly in England. Her home, Dimbola Lodge in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, south of England, has a history of its own.

In his excellent book The Sea Within (published by Forth Estate-Harper Collins), the English writer Philip Hoare writes that the man Julia would marry, Charles, was twenty years older than her and experienced a deep weakness in Ceylon. – today’s Sri Lanka – in the Indian Ocean.

Dibola Lodge takes its name from Charles’ family coffee plantation in Ceylon, which also influenced its architecture.

Settling in this exotic home on the all-British Channel Islands, Cameron developed a pioneering art of photography for the time, mostly portraiture.

Bohemian artists, intellectuals or “just weird guys” came and went to Cameron’s house.

According to Sailor Horus, her shadows and lighting are reminiscent of “underwater scenes”. A memorial is a photograph he took with Alice Lindell, which inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland when she was younger.

Today, in the house, which has become a museum, you can see hanging portraits of the great English poets of the Victorian era Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, as well as Charles Darwin. It is noteworthy that at the same time and on the same island, Tennyson wrote novels about King Arthur, and Darwin wrote his epic about the evolution of species. “It was as if the world had been rearranged in the far corners of England,” comments Hoare.

The island has always had a hypnotic character, green and blue, it seemed to float in a sea of ​​lethargy, but the Camerons’ house was visited by bohemian artists, intellectuals or “just weirdos”, dancing and impromptu theatrical performances. were organised. Some compared the house to the “Athens of Pericles”, to others it looked more like a “French drawing room than an English meeting place.”

The exoticism of Asia, however, eventually led the couple to distant Ceylon. Departing by ship from Southampton in 1875, they carefully arranged all their belongings into two coffins, one for each, which served as luggage. They knew they would never return to England again.

Four years later, Cameron breathed her last in Ceylon, high in the tea hills. Chorus writes that he died at night, looking at the starry sky. Her last word: “Beautiful.”