Tag: David Octavius Hill

Born on 20th May 1802 in Perth, Scotland, David Octavius Hill (1802-70) was a respected painter and secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy before he entered into the famous partnership with Robert Adamson becoming a photographer as well.
After studying drawing at Perth Academy, he was admitted to the School of Design in Edinburgh in 1818, where he studied painting, later becoming a landscape painter and publishing lithographs and “Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire” – an album published in Scotland under his father’s imprint. During the 1820s, Hill exhibited at the Royal Institution several times and from 1831 to 1840 he earned a reputation as a book illustrator, sketching and painting, for some of Scotland’s famous authors including Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns. He achieved success in 1840 with his popular painting of 61 landscapes, “The Land of Burns”, setting his status as secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy (1830-1869). A meeting in 1843 with Robert Adamson was to change his life forever. They formed a partnership from 1843 to 1848, producing commissioned portraits and selling prints through Alexander Hill’s gallery on Princes Street in Edinburgh, Scotland. They produced about three thousand photographs and exhibited at the Board of Manufacturers in 1843, the Royal Scottish Academy in 1844/45, and after Adamson’s death in 1848, their last exhibit took place at the Crystal Palace where Hill exhibited solo in 1851.