David Octavius Hill

David Octavius Hill

David Octavius Hill (20 May 1802 – 17 May 1870)[1] was a Scottish painter and arts
activist. He formed Hill & Adamson studio with the engineer and photographer Robert
Adamson between 1843 and 1847 to pioneer many aspects of photography in Scotland.
Contents

Early lifeEdit

Photograph from the frontispiece of an album dated 1848, showing D O Hill sketching in Greyfriars Kirkyard,
watched by the Misses Morris. Other tableauxin the same setting included The Artist and The Gravedigger

David Octavius Hill was born in 1802 in Perth. His father, a bookseller and publisher, helped
to re-establish Perth Academy and David was educated there as were his brothers. When his
older brother Alexander joined the publishers Blackwood's in Edinburgh, Hill went there to
study at the School of Design. He learned lithography and produced Sketches of Scenery in
Perthshire which was published as an album of views. His landscape paintings were shown
in the Institution for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland, and he was among the artists
dissatisfied with the Institution who established a separate Scottish Academy in 1829 with the
assistance of his close friend Henry Cockburn. A year later Hill took on unpaid secretarial
duties. He sought commissions in book illustration, with four sketches being used to
illustrate The Glasgow and Garnkirk Railway Prospectus in 1832, and went on to provide
illustrations for editions of Walter Scott and Robert Burns.
In the 1830s he is listed as living at 24 Queen Street, in Edinburgh's New Town.[2] In 1836
the Royal Scottish Academy began to pay him a salary as secretary, and with this security he
married his fiancée Ann Macdonald the following year. After the birth of their daughter,
Charlotte Hill, Ann was invalided, and died on 5 October 1841, aged 36, and was buried with
her family in Greyfriars Churchyard in Perth.[3] Charlotte Hill went on to marry the
author Walter Scott Dalgleish.
He continued to produce illustrations and to paint landscapes on commission. During this
period he lived at 28 Inverleith Row in Edinburgh's northern suburbs.[4]

David Octavius Hill by Patric Park, 1842

Bust on Hill's grave

Free Church of ScotlandEdit

The Disruption of 1843 was painted by Hill.

Clergymen who had been at the Assembly, photographed at Dumbarton Presbytery in 1845 as the basis for their
portraits in the top left row of the painting.

Hill was present at the Disruption Assembly in 1843 when over 450 ministers walked out of
the Church of Scotland assembly and down to another assembly hall to found the Free
Church of Scotland. He decided to record the dramatic scene with the encouragement of his
friend Lord Cockburn and another spectator, the physicist Sir David Brewster who suggested
using the new invention, photography, to get likenesses of all the ministers present. Brewster
was himself experimenting with this technology which only dated back to 1839, and he
introduced Hill to another enthusiast, Robert Adamson. Hill and Adamson took a series of
photographs of those who had been present and of the setting. The 5 feet (1.5 m) x 11.4 feet
(3.5 m) painting was eventually completed in 1866.
Photography studioEdit

"Rock House"

Hill moved to "Calton Hill Stairs" in 1850.[5]

Their collaboration, with Hill providing skill in composition and lighting, and Adamson
considerable sensitivity and dexterity in handling the camera, proved extremely successful,
and they soon broadened their subject matter. Adamson's studio, "Rock House",[6] on Calton
Hill in Edinburgh became the centre of their photographic experiments. Using
the calotype process, they produced a wide range of portraits depicting well-known Scottish
luminaries of the time, including Hugh Miller, both in the studio and outdoors, often amongst
the elaborate tombs in Greyfriars Kirkyard.
They photographed local and Fife landscapes and urban scenes, including images of the Scott
Monument under construction in Edinburgh. As well as the great and the good, they
photographed ordinary working folk, particularly the fishermen of Newhaven, and the
fishwives who carried the fish in creels the 3 miles (5 km) uphill to the city of Edinburgh to
sell them round the doors, with their cry of "Caller herrin" (fresh herring). They produced
several groundbreaking "action" photographs of soldiers and - perhaps their most famous
photograph - two priests walking side by side.
Their partnership produced around 3,000 prints, but was cut short after only four years due to
the ill health and death of Adamson in 1848. The calotypes faded under sunlight, so had to be
kept in albums, and though Hill continued the studio for some months, he became less active
and abandoned the studio, though he continued to sell prints of the photographs and to use
them as an aid for composing paintings. In 1862 he remarried, to the sculptress Amelia
Robertson Paton, 20 years his junior, and around that time took up photography again, but the
results were more static and less successful than his collaboration with Adamson. He was
badly affected by the death of his daughter and his work slowed. In 1866 he finished
the Disruption picture which received wide acclaim, though many of the participants had died
by then. The photographer F.C. Annan produced fine reduced facsimiles of the painting for
sale throughout the Free Church, and a group of subscribers raised £1,200 to buy the painting
for the church. In 1869 illness forced him to give up his post as secretary to the RSA, and he
died in May 1870.
Hill is buried in Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh - one of the finest Victorian cemeteries in
Scotland. He is portrayed in a bust sculpted by his second wife, Amelia, who is buried
alongside him.
ExhibitionsEdit
Some of his photographs were put on show in Glasgow in 1954 but the first major
exhibition of his work was in 1963 in Essen, Germany.[7]