Hill & Adamson photographs (Academy photographic editions)

In 1843 painter David Octavius Hill joined engineer Robert Adamson to form Scotland's first photographic studio. During their brief partnership that ended with Adamson's untimely death, Hill and Adamson produced "the first substantial body of self-consciously artistic work using the newly invented medium of photography."Watercolorist John Harden, on first seeing Hill and Adamson's calotypes in November 1843, wrote, "The pictures produced are as Rembrandt's but improved, so like his style and the oldest and finest masters that doubtless a great progress in Portrait painting and effect must be the consequence."