David Octavius Hill

A carte-de-visite portrait of the Scottish photographer and painter David Octavius Hill (1802-1870), who between 1843 and 1847 collaborated with the engineer and photographer Robert Adamson at Rock House, Adamson’s studio on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. Using the Calotype process, they produced portraits of well-known Scottish luminaries and an important series of portraits of the fishermen and fishwives of Newhaven, the fishing village just outside Edinburgh on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. Their partnership produced around 3000 photographs but was cut short by Robert Adamson’s early death in 1848, from tuberculosis, at the age of only 26.

Hill’s best known work as an artist is The Disruption Assembly, a vast painting showing the ministers who broke away from the established Church of Scotland in 1843 in order to form the Free Church of Scotland.

David Octavius Hill died, aged 67, on 17 May 1870.

‘DAVID OCTAVIUS HILL, R.S.A., died at his residence, Newington Lodge, Edinburgh, on Tuesday last. Born in 1802, he was the son of a bookseller in Perth and in early boyhood was sent to Edinburgh to study art under the late Mr Andrew Wilson. His first work was a series of views lithographed by himself of scenes in Perthshire. For a time he gave himself up to figure-painting, but afterwards almost wholly confined himself to landscapes. […] For above forty years he was yearly an exhibitor in the Scottish Exhibitions of Art. […] Mr Hill was for nearly forty years secretary to the Royal Academy, and he was one of the founders of the Association for promoting the Fine Arts in Scotland. Mr Hill was twice married, and is survived by his second wife, a sister of Sir Noel Paton’s, and possessed of significant talent as a sculptor’ (Banffshire Journal, 24 May 1870).

Surprisingly, this obituary makes no mention of Hill’s work as an early photographer, which is how he is best remembered today.

Photographed by James Good Tunny of Edinburgh.

[There is no inscription on the mount identifying the sitter. The identification rests solely on a perceived likeness between the sitter and other, well-known portraits of Hill. However, the carte comes from the collection of the late Murray MacKinnon (died 2021); it was he who made the identification and he is unlikely to have made a mistake.]