In four and
a half years and nearly 3,000 images, the Scottish team of Hill and Adamson
pioneered the aesthetic terrain of photography, creating the earliest
substantial body of self-consciously artistic work in the new medium. Hill was
a locally prominent painter in Edinburgh with a keen sense of composition and
an affable manner that put his sitters at ease; Adamson, 20 years his junior,
brought to the partnership an extraordinary mastery of the negative-positive
photographic process invented just a few years earlier by the Englishman
William Henry Fox Talbot. Although Hill and Adamson’s portraits lacked the
extraordinary precision of contemporaneous daguerreotypes, they were much
admired for the warm tones and Rembrandtesque massing of light and shadow that
were characteristics of Talbot’s process.

Their portrait of Dr. Munro is one of some 200 the
team made as preparatory studies for a grand history painting that Hill planned
in commemoration of the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843.
Ultimately, these photographic studies proved to be a far more powerful record
than Hill’s large but lackluster painting.