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cut across Victorian class lines, the contemporary critic
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake claimed their work “fi rst cast
the glamour of photography upon us.”
The astounding aesthetic and technical sophistication
of Hill and Adamson’s photographs so soon after the
medium’s advent was a considerable feat, lending valu-
able credence to photography’s artistic viability. Their
broad use of light and innovative printing techniques
would later infl uence the Pictorialists, while 20th-cen-
tury modernists would admire the pair’s unequivocal
handling of the camera towards aesthetic ends.
As with many great partnerships, Hill and Adamson
made an unlikely pair. Hill was born in Perth, Scotland
on 20 May 1802, the eighth of 12 children to Thomas
Hill, a bookseller and publisher, and Emilia Murray. Ad-
amson, nearly 20 years his junior, was born in Burnside,
Scotland on 26 April 1821, one of 10 children to farm
proprietors Alexander Adamson and Rachel Melville.
Hill studied drawing at Perth Academy under David
Junor and was admitted to the School of Design in
Edinburgh in 1818, where he studied painting under
Andrew Wilson. In 1821 he produced some of the
fi rst lithographs in Scotland in Sketches of Scenery
in Perthshire, an album published under his father’s
imprint. Principally a landscape painter, Hill exhibited
at the Royal Institution several times in the 1820s.
From 1831 to 1840 he secured a reputation as a book
illustrator, producing sketches and paintings of Scottish
scenes to accompany the works of the country’s most
famous authors, including Sir Walter Scott and Robert
Burns. He achieved considerable success in 1840 with
the immensely popular The Land of Burns, for which
he painted 61 landscapes, and his status as secretary of
the Royal Scottish Academy (1830–1869) helped secure
his place in the Scottish art world.
Adamson, on the other hand, was sickly and introvert-
ed as a youth and cultivated an aptitude for science and
mechanics. He enjoyed building models and instruments
and in his adolescence apprenticed for a millwright for
one or two years, but his uncertain health prevented him
from continuing in that fi eld. His older brother Robert, a
doctor and professor at St. Andrews University, learned
William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype photography pro-
cess from his colleague Sir David Brewster in 1841, and
he taught Adamson the process the following year. The
brothers embarked on an intense period of photographic
experimentation and by early 1843 Adamson decided to
become a professional photographer in Edinburgh.
Hill and Adamson’s partnership arose from a fortu-
itous confl uence of events in May 1843. On 10 May,
Adamson opened his studio in Rock House, on Calton
Hill Stairs in Edinburgh and a week later, beginning 18
May, the Church of Scotland held its general assembly
in the city, an acrimonious event that resulted in the
breakaway Free Church of Scotland. Hill attended the
assembly and saw an opportunity to commemorate an
important episode in Scottish history and further his
own career by creating a large-scale painting depicting
the momentous signing of the Deed of Demission, then
selling engravings of the work by subscription. As the
task would require hundreds of sketches of assembly
delegates, by early June Brewster had suggested pho-
tography to Hill and introduced him to Adamson.
Adamson eagerly joined the project, hastily pho-
tographing church leaders, and soon both men appre-
hended the greater potential of their collaboration. By
July they were advertising and exhibiting their work as a
team and planned photographs “representing diff[eren]t
bodies & classes of individuals.” At year’s end the Free
Church series was nearly complete, after additional sit-
tings at a second assembly in Glasgow, and the partners
broadened their scope to make views around Edinburgh
as well as commence a pioneering series of labor por-
traits from the nearby Newhaven fi shing community.
Despite contrasting personalities and talents, Hill and
Adamson easily established a productive relationship,
suggesting that each had an almost intuitive understand-
ing of the other. Hill’s charisma and artistic background
combined with Adamson’s perfectionism and previous
photographic experience allowed each partner his own
strengths as well as a healthy sense of dependence on
the other. Although photo-historians occasionally have
credited Hill as the artistic force behind the collabora-
tion, with Adamson acting only as assistant (since he
handled all camera and printing operations), the rela-
tionship appears far more complex, and neither man’s
outside work rivals the pair’s collaborative results.
Relying on their connections to the British publishing,
art and academic worlds, they assembled a prestigious
and willing pool of sitters that included painters, sculp-
tors, writers, scientists, statesmen and scholars. Their
portraits convey these individuals as engaging, dynamic
and thoughtful, exhibiting a remarkable consistency
in tonal range matched with compositional schemes
inspired in part by the Scottish portraiture tradition,
particularly the work of Sir Henry Raeburn.
Hill and Adamson blended sophisticated posing
with modulated, refl ected light that intensifi ed forms
and enhanced interplay with the surrounding space.
Their work was frequently compared to Rembrandt’s
in its bold use of light, not merely to accentuate details
but to create strong massings of light and dark that
brought an emotional depth to the sitter. They turned
the limitations of the camera and the calotype to their
advantage, benefi ting from the paper’s rough grain and
the lens’ slight peripheral distortion to create areas of
sharpness and softness. “The calotype failing in details,”
Adamson explained, “is the very life of it” (Ford and
Strong 1974, 37).
In their portrait of “Miss Justine Munro,” Hill and Ad-