Description: This studio photograph depicts a dark haired man with receding hairline standing next to a curtain with his right hand on the curved back of a chair.
Historical Note: This portrait by an unknown photographer shows artist James Cameron (1817-1882) at the approximate age of forty, about the time he would have been working in Tennessee. Cameron was born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1817 and came to America with his family in 1833, settling in the Philadelphia area. When he was about 22 he moved to the then small town of Indianapolis, Indiana, where he hoped to develop a career in portraiture but lack of commissions sent him back to Philadelphia by 1847. It was then that he married Emma Alcock, an artist in her own right, and the two honeymooned in Italy. Cameron later exhibited Italian scenes at the American Art Union and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1851). By the 1850s, Cameron had moved to Nashville and there met Colonel James Anderson Whiteside, a wealthy Chattanooga industrialist and railroad investor. Whiteside encouraged the artist to move to Chattanooga, providing Cameron with a place to live and helping him find commissions. Cameron's portraits and landscapes dating from the 1850s record settings in and around Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Nashville.
Institution: Chattanooga Hamilton County Bicentennial Library
Publisher: Digital Initiatives, James E. Walker Library, Middle Tennessee State University
Rights: Images reproduced on this website are intended for individual, educational use only. For research inquiries about specific objects or requests for high resolution images, contact the Chattanooga Hamilton County Bicentennial Library.
