The Sensual Pre-Raphaelite Art of Valentine Cameron Prinsep

Valentine Cameron “Val” Prinsep RA (14 February 1838 / 11 November 1904) was a British painter of the Pre-Raphaelite school. Born in Calcutta, India, he was the second child of Henry Thoby Prinsep, a civil servant of the British Raj, and his wife Sarah Monckton Pattle, daughter of James Pattle. His mother was a sister of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and Maria Jackson (née Pattle), grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Henry and Sarah Prinsep returned to England in 1843. They settled in 1851 at Little Holland House, and made it a centre of artistic society. Henry Thoby Prinsep was a friend of the painter George Frederic Watts, under whom his son first studied, and traveled with Watts in 1856-57 to Sir Charles Thomas Newton‘s excavation of Halicarnassus. He then went to Charles Gleyre’s atelier in Paris. There James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Edward Poynter, and George du Maurier were among his fellow students, and he was later the original for Taffy in Du Maurier’s novel Trilby.