Lot 67: David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) & Robert Adamson (1821-1848) , james linton

salt print from a paper negative, mounted, matted, 1844-45

measurements note 7 5/8 by 5 5/8 in. (19.4 by 14.3 cm.)

Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991), pl. 33 (this print)Other prints of this image:David Bruce, Sun Pictures: The Hill-Adamson Calotypes (Greenwich, 1973), p. 175Sara Stevenson, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson: Catalogue of Their Calotypes Taken Between 1843 and 1847 in the Collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh, 1981), p. 196, Newhaven 1In Focus: Hill and Adamson (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), pl. 33

Christie's South Kensington, 9 November 1989, Sale MCA 2650/MPH 3651, Lot 276Acquired by Hans P. Kraus, Jr., New York, from the aboveAcquired by the Quillan Company from the above, 1990

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson were among the first photographers to master William Henry Fox Talbot's negative-positive process, and the image offered here is a classic example of their talents in portraiture. In the small fishing village of Newhaven, north of Edinburgh, Hill and Adamson made more than 100 calotypes depicting fishermen, 'fisher-lassies,' and 'fisher-laddies' in their picturesque surroundings. The present study of one James Linton succeeds as both a document and as a work of art; its expressive renderings of light and dark, coupled with the sitter's natural pose, are characteristic of the artistry Hill and Adamson brought to all of their work. In 1849, the year after Adamson's death, Professor Robert Hunt wrote, 'Photography has not yet been taken up by an artist with a view to its improvement, except by Mr. Hill, of Edinburgh, whose groups of the Newhaven fishermen, executed by the Calotype process, have been universally admired' (quoted in David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, p. 20). Hill and Adamson were praised not only by contemporary critics, but also by a number of twentieth-century photographers and curators. Alfred Stieglitz included their work in three issues of Camera Work and in the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo in 1910, and Beaumont Newhall showed a variety of their images in his landmark Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Photography 1839 - 1937.