The Learner – B2 – Hill, Adamson and the Birth of Photography in Edinburgh

On the morning of 18 May 1843, over 450 ministers of the Church of Scotland walked out of the General Assembly in Edinburgh, signed a declaration, and founded the Free Church of Scotland. The painter David Octavius Hill was in the crowd. He decided, on the spot, to commemorate this moment in a vast painting — and in doing so, set in motion one of the most extraordinary collaborations in the history of art. Photography was four years old. Scotland, as luck would have it, was one of the only places on earth where it could be practised freely.

The invention of photography was announced to the world in 1839, and it arrived trailing two competing processes and a labyrinth of patents. The Frenchman Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype produced exquisitely detailed images on silvered copper plates — but each was unique, could not be reproduced, and required the sitter to remain motionless for several minutes in bright sun, frequently held in place by metal clamps. The Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot had developed the calotype — a paper-based negative from which multiple prints could be made — but he had patented it so aggressively in England that practically nobody could use it without paying him. In Scotland, however, Fox Talbot’s patent did not apply. Scotland was free. And in St Andrews, the physicist Sir David Brewster — a man who seemed to know everyone in early 19th-century science — had already been sharing the calotype process with a small circle of enthusiasts, including two brothers named Adamson.

Robert Adamson was 21 years old when he arrived in Edinburgh in May 1843. He had wanted to be an engineer, but his health — he had been chronically ill since boyhood — was not robust enough for that physically demanding career. Photography offered a less strenuous alternative. He leased Rock House, a modest building at the foot of Calton Hill, where he could exploit the best natural light in the city, and set up Edinburgh’s — and Scotland’s — first professional calotype studio. Within weeks, he was introduced to a gregarious, well-connected landscape painter named David Octavius Hill. Their meeting, arranged by Sir David Brewster, would produce one of the most remarkable bodies of work in the history of photography.

The Disruption: An Impossible Painting and an Improbable Solution

Hill’s challenge was formidable. He intended to paint every one of the 450-odd ministers who had signed the Deed of Demission — the founding document of the Free Church — and he had only days before they dispersed back to their parishes across Scotland. “I got hold of the artist,” Sir David Brewster wrote to Fox Talbot in early June 1843, “showed him the Calotype, and the eminent advantage he might derive from it in getting likenesses of all the principal characters before they were dispersed to their respective homes. He was at first incredulous, but went to Mr. Adamson, and arranged with him preliminaries for getting all the necessary portraits.”

Within weeks, Hill was not merely using photography as a tool — he was completely won over by it. The two men entered a formal partnership. The painting that had prompted the partnership would take Hill twenty-three years to complete — it was finally finished in 1866 — and proved to be a laborious, rather pedestrian work. But the photographs made in the service of that painting became something far greater: the first substantial body of self-consciously artistic work ever made in the medium of photography. In less than four and a half years, Hill and Adamson would produce approximately 3,000 calotypes — an extraordinary output for a process that required heavy equipment, volatile chemicals, and the full cooperation of the Scottish weather.

[Calotype: “The Morning After” — Hill & Adamson, 1845]
Image from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Hill & Adamson (1845): “David Octavius Hill and Professor James Miller — Known as ‘The Morning After “He Greatly Daring Dined”‘”. Hill (seated, left) nurses a hangover while his friend James Miller, Professor of Surgery at Edinburgh University and a temperance reformer, takes his pulse with a mildly reproachful expression. The Roman bust between them appears to be turning away in disgust. The title is a pun on Ovid’s epitaph for Phaethon: “Here lies he who greatly daring, more greatly failed.” Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

Rock House: The World’s Most Unlikely Art Studio

The studio at Rock House was not a studio in any modern sense. Calotype photography required bright natural light, and exposure times of several seconds to several minutes depending on conditions. This meant that virtually all of the duo’s portrait work was done outdoors — in the garden of Rock House, in the adjacent kirkyard of Calton Hill, in Greyfriars Churchyard with its elaborate funerary monuments, and — most famously — in the fishing village of Newhaven, three miles along the Firth of Forth. Sitters were required to remain perfectly still for the duration of each exposure, often held in place by hidden metal clamps or supports. Photographs that look like candid snapshots — Hill sprawled with friends in a picnic, a group of ministers deep in conversation — were in fact carefully choreographed scenes, each one requiring intense coordination and a great deal of patience from everyone involved.

The division of labour between the two men was clear and complementary. Adamson was the consummate technician, excelling in — and in some cases improving upon — the chemical and optical processes Talbot had developed. Hill was the artist and the socialite: his connections at the Royal Scottish Academy and in Edinburgh’s literary and artistic world meant there was no shortage of distinguished visitors climbing the narrow steps to Rock House. His gregariousness — what contemporaries called his “suavity of manner and absence of all affectation” — meant that sitters relaxed in front of the camera in a way that made the resulting portraits seem natural, even when the exposure required them to hold a single pose for minutes. Between them, they had something that neither possessed alone: what the critic Watercolourist John Harden called, on first seeing their calotypes in November 1843, “pictures as Rembrandt’s but improved, so like his style and the oldest and finest masters that doubtless a great progress in Portrait painting and effect must be the consequence.”

The Photographs That Changed Art History

The body of work Hill and Adamson produced in their four and a half years together is almost impossible to overstate in its historical importance. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Getty Museum, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery all hold significant collections. Their work was published in Alfred Stieglitz’s influential journal Camera Work in the early 20th century — the publication that defined photography as a serious art form for the American avant-garde. James Craig Annan, son of the Glasgow photographer Thomas Annan who had come to possess many of Hill and Adamson’s original negatives, made a series of exquisite photogravures from the calotype negatives in the early 20th century that cemented their international reputation.

What made their calotypes distinctive — and what sets them apart even today — was their quality of apparently spontaneous life. In an era when most photographs were stiff, self-conscious records of people straining to hold a pose, Hill and Adamson’s portraits convey personality, mood, and relationship. The fishermen of Newhaven lean against their boats with the ease of men who have done it a thousand times. The ministers of the Free Church argue and confer. Isabella Burns Begg — sister of Robert Burns — stares out of one image with a gaze so penetrating that it seems to cross the 180 years since it was made.

[Calotype: Newhaven Fishwives — Jeanie Wilson & Annie Linton, c.1845]
Image from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Hill & Adamson (c.1845): “Newhaven Fishwives — Jeanie Wilson and Annie Linton.” Part of approximately 120 photographs of the Newhaven fishing community — widely considered the world’s first social documentary photographs. The women carried fish in creels three miles uphill to Edinburgh to sell. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons / Cleveland Museum of Art.

The Firsts: What Hill and Adamson Were the First to Photograph

The Hill and Adamson body of work contains a remarkable number of documented “firsts” — in many cases because the technology itself was so new that almost anything they pointed the camera at had never been photographed before.

Professor James Miller and the Famous Calotypes of Friendship

Among the 3,000 calotypes, a handful have achieved a kind of iconic status that transcends the history of photography — photographs that feel, even now, startlingly alive. The most famous of these feature Hill himself as subject rather than director, and they involve a recurring character: Professor James Miller, Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh, close friend of Hill’s, and — with beautiful irony — a committed temperance reformer.

The calotype known as The Morning After “He Greatly Daring Dined” (c.1845) shows Hill seated, evidently suffering the effects of a substantial evening of conviviality, a glass of seltzer at his side. Professor Miller holds Hill’s wrist and fixes him with an expression that can only be described as reproachful — the look of a man whose own professional and principled commitment to sobriety has been rudely tested by his friend’s excesses. Between them, a Roman bust — by the sculptor John Stevens — appears to be turning away in disgust. The image takes its title from the epitaph on the grave of Phaethon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Here lies Phaethon, in the sun-god’s chariot fared — and though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.” Hill may have seen himself in the doomed Phaethon, attempting to harness the power of the sun to create his photographs — and, on at least some evenings, failing to exercise the appropriate restraint.

The other great group portrait — Edinburgh Ale — shows Hill with friends James Ballantine and Dr George Bell, gathered around what are clearly very good glasses of ale. It is one of the earliest staged group tableaux in photography — carefully arranged to look casual, conveying the warmth and camaraderie of the Edinburgh artistic circle that Hill moved at the centre of. From letters, we know that Hill liked his ale and frequented literary and artistic gatherings where, as one contemporary noted, “the wit and intelligence improved with the quantity of drink and the lateness of the hour.”

The Women of Newhaven: Photography and Class

If the portraits of Edinburgh’s luminaries show one dimension of Hill and Adamson’s ambition, their work at Newhaven reveals another — and arguably more radical — one. Newhaven was a small, independent fishing village a short distance from Edinburgh, and its women — the fishwives who baited lines, cleaned catches, and carried heavy creels of fish on their backs three miles uphill to Edinburgh to sell door to door — were famous throughout the city for their strength, their distinctive striped dresses and white caps, their outspoken character, and their fierce solidarity with one another. They were admired by Queen Victoria. George IV had thought them “handsome,” in the sense of impressive and strong.

What Hill and Adamson did at Newhaven was not merely picturesque documentary. It was, in the context of 1840s photography, a radical act of artistic investment. Working-class people — fishermen leaning against their boats, women gathering around a minister who has come to call, a father with his children by the shore — were treated with the same compositional care, the same attention to light and expression and pose, that Hill gave to the ministers of the Free Church. Elizabeth Johnstone Hall, the “Beauty of Newhaven,” looks out from one portrait with the presence and self-possession of a noblewoman. Jeanie Wilson and Annie Linton, photographed together in their working clothes, are dignified, individual, and unmistakably themselves. These were not condescending images of the picturesque poor. They were the first social documentary photographs in the history of the medium.

Jessie Mann: The Hidden Pioneer

The story of Hill and Adamson cannot be told without mentioning the person who worked alongside them and has been written out of it for most of the intervening 180 years. Jessie Mann — born in Perth in 1805, a childhood friend of Hill’s — worked at Rock House for at least three years, until Adamson’s death in January 1848. She prepared chemicals, framed images, made exposures, and was described in a letter of 1845 from the painter James Naysmith as “that most skilful and zealous of assistants.”

The portrait of King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery — taken at Rock House in 1844, when Hill and Adamson were both unavailable — is believed to have been taken by Mann. If this attribution is correct, it would make Jessie Mann one of the first women to take a professional photograph anywhere in the world. Tate curator Carol Jacobi has said that Mann’s attributed photograph of the King of Saxony “demonstrates that she must have been part of their skilful understanding of how you set up a photograph, so she is a real pioneer.” For most of the 20th century, art historians often credited the duo’s work to Hill alone, with Adamson as an afterthought. Mann was virtually invisible. The process of recovering her contribution — like the process of recovering many women’s contributions to early photography — is still ongoing.

Adamson’s Death and Hill’s Grief

Robert Adamson died on 14 January 1848, at the age of twenty-six. He had been ill for years — the ill-health that had diverted him from engineering had never left him — and the demanding outdoor work of calotype photography, in Edinburgh’s cold and damp winters, had not helped. Hill was devastated. He continued at Rock House for some months but eventually could not sustain it. The studio closed. The calotype negatives — precious and fragile, prone to fading in sunlight, only properly visible when kept in albums — were stored, some eventually passing to Thomas Annan and then to his son James Craig Annan, whose photogravure reprints in the early 20th century would introduce Hill and Adamson to a new generation of photographers and critics.

Hill completed his vast Disruption painting in 1866 — twenty-three years after the event it depicted. If you look closely at the canvas, you can find a small anachronism: in one corner, a man with a sketchpad, and beside him, another man holding a camera. It was Hill’s tribute to his dead friend and collaborator — a poignant acknowledgement that the painting owed everything to the partnership.

Are They Known Outside Scotland? The International Legacy

The short answer is: they should be better known everywhere, and in some circles, they are enormously celebrated. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds twenty-five calotypes selected by Hill himself as his finest achievements. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles holds a collection. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds major holdings. The National Portrait Gallery in London has an entire set of Hill and Adamson albums. Alfred Stieglitz — the man who arguably did more than anyone to establish photography as a serious art form in America — published their work in Camera Work and credited them as foundational figures.

According to Anne Lyden, international photography curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, “Hill and Adamson were among the earliest photographic partnerships in photography — not just Scottish photography. They were working at a time when there was no history of photography, the art form was very new, and its full potential was yet to be realized. However, they were able to demonstrate the artistic capabilities of the medium, producing beautiful and inspiring images during the 1840s that continue to resonate today.”

The first major public exhibition of their work outside Scotland was held in Essen, Germany, in 1963 — a fact that says something about the delayed recognition that even the most important artists can receive. Today, their calotypes appear in major retrospectives, are studied in art history courses worldwide, and are held in collections on three continents. In Scotland itself, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery holds the definitive collection and continues to expand and reinterpret it — most recently through the lens of the Frederick Douglass connection and the long-overdue recognition of Jessie Mann.

The question of legacy is, ultimately, not about whether they are famous enough. It is about what they did and why it mattered. In less than five years, working with materials that were barely understood, in a medium that had no aesthetic history, in a studio that was barely a shed on a hill in a city they both loved — they produced the first substantial artistic body of work in photography’s history. They photographed the great and the ordinary with equal care. They invented social documentary. They gave photography the vocabulary of portraiture. They made images that, 180 years later, still feel startlingly present — as if Hill is about to look up from his seltzer and ask what you think of Adamson’s latest negative.