A 150 year old photograph of a girl who later found love and happiness in Falmouth when she met and married a local granite dealer, sold for £13,176 at an auction in America.

The picture of Kate Keown, taken when she was ten or 11, is particularly valuable because it was taken in or around 1867 to 1868 by trail-blazing Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who is now acknowledged as one of Britain’s greatest female photographers, possibly the greatest.

The photograph was owned and treasured until his death by Oscar-winning actor, Charlton Heston, and was among more than 300 of his possessions which were auctioned at Bonhams in Los Angeles recently.

Kate Keown’s links with Falmouth were not mentioned in the auction catalogue, but are confirmed in the 1891,1901 and 1911 censuses when she was living in Falmouth. In 1884, she married Penryn-born, Falmouth-based granite dealer, Bernard Augustin Freeman. In 1891, Kate and Bernard Freeman were living

at Wodehouse Terrace. Sometime between 1891 and 1901, they moved to Spotfield House in Melville Road, before they moved again to Beach View at Gyllyngvase. Kate was 65 when she died in 1922 and Bernard was 75 when he died in 1936.

In her book, Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women, author Sylvia Wolf said: “Kate Keown appears frequently in Cameron’s photographs. Cameron called upon numerous children to pose for her camera. In some instances, Cameron posed the children as themselves, but she more often used them to embody childhood innocence. The Keown sisters were among the children, who donned gowns or angel wings to play the part of Cupid or the infant Christ in Cameron’s photographs.”

This is not the first time an 1860s photograph of Kate Keown by Julia Margaret Cameron has come up for sale. At Sotheby’s in London in 2001 another of Kate was expected to sell for between £40,000 and £60,000, but went for £174,000, and set a new world auction record for a Cameron photograph.