Edinburgh. The Orphan Hospital
Medium
Salted paper print from paper negative
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937
Accession Number
37.98.1.29
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the dawn of photography *Edinburgh. The Orphan Hospital (1843–47), salted paper print from a paper by the pioneering Scottish duo David Octavius and Robert Adamson, collectively known as Hill and Adam. Hill, a skilled painter, teamed up with Adamson, a chemistry-savvy photographer, in 1843 to capture Scotland's people and places using the calotype process—invented by William Henry Fox Talbot just a few years earlier. This medium, involving a paper negative exposed in the camera and contact-printed onto salted paper, produced soft, painterly images with subtle tones, bridging painting...
About the Artist
David Octavius Hill|Robert Adamson|Hill and Adamson · 1802–1870
David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) was a Scottish painter, photographer, and arts administrator whose pioneering photography partnership with Robert Adamson from 1843 to 1847 transformed the medium into an art form. Born in Perth and trained in Edinburgh, Hill established himself as a landscape painter and became secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy, a position he held for nearly forty years. His ...