Beatrice Cenci

Photograph entitled 'Beatrice Cenci' takne by Julia Margaret Cameron in about 1870. Carbon print.

This photographic portrait of Mary Emily 'May' Prinsep (1853-1931) is a carbon print made by the Autotype Company from an original negative taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in about 1870. Cameron had approximately seventy of her negatives printed as permanent carbon prints by the Autotype Company as she was worried about the longevity of albumen prints. Beatrice Cenci, a character from Percy Bysshe Shelley's (1792-1822) play 'The Cenci' (1819), was a young woman convicted of patricide and hanged in 1599. Shelley's play was based on a murder which took place in Rome in the late sixteenth century.