David Octavius Hill
David Octavius Hill at the Gate of Rock House

Public Domain

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Images(3)

Artist David Octavius Hill Scottish, 1802–1870

Artist Robert Adamson Scottish, 1821–1848

CultureScottish

Titles

David Octavius Hill at the Gate of Rock House

Date1843

MediumSalted paper print from paper negative

DimensionsImage: 7 15/16 × 6 3/16 in. (20.2 × 15.7 cm)
Sheet: 8 7/16 × 6 7/16 in. (21.4 × 16.4 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Manfred Heiting Collection

Object number2004.500

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Manfred Heiting Collection of Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionIn four and a half years and nearly three thousand 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, twenty 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. Hill, handsome and naturally relaxed in front of the camera, here stands at the entrance to Adamson’s studio, Rock House.
ProvenanceChristie's, London, October 20, 1993; Robert Hershkowitz Ltd, London.

Bought by Manfred Heiting from Robert Hershkowitz Limited on 12/9/1989.
Exhibition History"Self, Model, and Self as Other," The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,13 July – 29 September, 2013.

“A History of Photography II: Selections from the Museum's Collection,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 17–July 19, 2015.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Marked in pencil, verso, lower left corner of image: "7"

Marked in white, recto of image, bottom: "D O Hill [indecipherable]"

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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