The National Galleries of Scotland houses a major collection of historic photography as well as a growing number of photographs relating to contemporary art practice. Thanks to the generosity of donors, collectors and photographers, these holdings now amount to some 40,000 works. At the heart of the collection is the world’s largest and most important archive of the work of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. The partnership between these two early practitioners is now one of the most famous in the entire history of the medium. Their collaboration not only resulted in an array of hauntingly beautiful images but also helped to establish an international reputation for Scotland as a centre for photography.
Robert Adamson trained as an engineer but learned the techniques of photography from his older brother John, a physician and curator of the St Andrews University museum. The new art of photography had been announced to the public in 1839 with rival processes developed in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and in England by William Henry Fox Talbot. The Adamson brothers were part of a circle of enthusiasts in St Andrews that included the physicist Sir David Brewster and the provost Hugh Lyon Playfair, who worked to master the complex processes of Fox Talbot’s calotype photography. From the Greek kalos meaning beautiful, calotype photography involved the production of a negative and positive image on paper that had been treated with various light-sensitive chemicals.
The younger Adamson, Robert, decided to pursue a career as a photographer and in 1843 he moved to Edinburgh, establishing a studio in Rock House, high on Calton Hill where he could catch the best possible light.
Shortly afterwards, he was introduced to the landscape and genre painter David Octavius Hill. After a few weeks working together on studies for a vast painting of the first General Assembly of the recently formed Free Church of Scotland, the two men decided to enter into a partnership to explore the possibilities of the new medium of photography. The contrasting skills and personalities of Hill and Adamson made for an unlikely pairing. Adamson was an introverted character with an aptitude for science and technology while Hill, some nineteen years older, was an established artist and popular figure in Edinburgh’s artistic community. Their collaboration lasted only four years, but in this short period the pair created a large and varied body of work, including many individual and group portraits as well as views of Edinburgh and genre scenes.
The photograph illustrated here dates from 1845 and shows the newly completed monument to Walter Scott on Princes Street with Edinburgh Castle and the Royal Institution building (now part of the Scottish National Gallery) in the background. In December 1843, Hill and Adamson obtained permission to take a camera onto the roof of the Royal Institution to photograph the half-built monument. Over the following months they charted the last phases of its construction and the work of the masons in a series of calotypes. The base of the monument is empty in this image, as John Steell’s great sculpture of Sir Walter Scott was not installed until the following year. The Scott Monument is now a familiar part of the perspective along Edinburgh’s Princes Street, but Hill and Adamson’s image captures something of the strangeness and novelty of this bizarre Gothic shrine at the heart of neoclassical Edinburgh.