Professor Alexander Monro, 'Tertius', 1773–1859, Anatomist

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 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. This portrait of the Scottish surgeon and anatomist Alexander Monro demonstrates the warm tones and careful attenuation of light and shadow characteristic of Hill and Adamson’s portraits.