Matron saint of Victorian greats

Photography was still young when Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron first operated a camera, but the lady herself was (by the standards of her day) quite old. She first resorted to the genteel novelty at the age of 48, drawn to it partly as a way to fill the lonely hours while her husband and son were away on the business of Empire. Within barely a year, by 1865, she was producing photographs as fine as any that vast Empire had so far seen.

Within another two years, by 1866-7, she was producing photographs as fine as any that have ever been taken. She ought to be recognised as the matron saint of every mature housewife returning to the job market, and of all late starters in any art or science.

Almost every book on early photography treats her with due respect and some of her portraits - the so-called Dirty Monk study of her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, and good friend, Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example - will be familiar to almost every literate Briton. And yet, despite her canonical status, it has usually been hard to see more than a handful of her original prints at any one time, which is why the National Portrait Gallery's superb new show is instructive as well as delightful.

Authoritatively curated by the pioneering scholar of Mrs Cameron's work, Colin Ford, the exhibition examines every phase of her short but intensely productive career.

At the beginning, the tentative family portraits of her novice months; at the end, the enigmatic (and, until now, little-known) portraits and semi-ethnological studies she made in Ceylon, where she spent the last four years of her life, from 1875 to 1879, supporting her husband's painful efforts to rescue their coffee plantation from financial ruin.

In between these extremes lies a rich and varied body of work, some of it a little out of line with 21st century tastes, some of it simply glorious, all of it the product of scrupulous preparation and rapidly developing skill - no matter how much the Victorian gentleman critics may have tutted about the softness of her focus.

Ford has arranged this work thematically: portraits of women, portraits of children, religious allegories derived from painters of the Italian Renaissance, illustrations for Tennyson's Idylls of the King and other books.

One of Ford's intentions is to solicit renewed sympathy for the religious and literary pictures, generally written off in recent years as a lamentable lapse into kitsch.

In at least one case, he succeeds: the image of a frankfaced little girl with angel wings now looks less like sickly piety than a weird, half-comic anticipation of surrealism.

Towering above all, there are her portraits of men: the more or less unknown, such as Iago, whose preposterously handsome face, all razor blade cheekbones and unrazored jaw, would not look out of place in a Scorsese movie; and, of course, the greats.