St. Andrews (?). Ships in the Harbor

Art Historical Context

**St. Andrews (?). Ships in the Harbor**1843–47) is a captivating salted paper print from a paper, created by the pioneering Scottish partnership of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson., a noted painter, teamed up with the technically gifted Adamson in 1843 to document Scottish life through the revolutionary calotype process—a Talbot-patented method using paper negatives that allowed for multiple prints with a soft, painterly quality. This image, housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Photographs Department (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937), likely captures the bustling harbor of St. An...

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 ...