Art Institute of Chicago

Dumbarton Presbytery

David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802–1870) and

Date

March 29, 1845

Medium

Salted paper print

Culture

Scotland

Department

Photography and Media

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Painter and illustrator David Octavius Hill engaged photographer Robert Adamson to help him fulfill a monumental commission to commemorate the so-called Disruption of 1843, in which the Free Church of Scotland was formed when a group of ministers seceded from the country’s established church. Hill wished to portray each of the nearly 450 participants at the Disruption Assembly, and found an efficient means of doing so by working from photographs, specifically the recently patented paper negative process, which Adamson had begun practicing professionally earlier that year. Together, Hill and Adamson made around 2,500 images in the short period before Adamson’s illness and death; it then took Hill 20 years to complete the painting. This is one of the few carefully composed group portraits that Hill eventually transferred almost unchanged onto canvas—he painted one man as bald, however, to reflect his later appearance.

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