
Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson
<p>In 1843 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson formed a fortuitous partnership that resulted in one of the first marriages of photography and fine art. Hill, a painter and illustrator, found an efficient means of recording the likenesses of his subjects in the newly invented calotype process, which Adamson had begun practicing professionally earlier that year. Using paper for negatives as well as prints, they obtained relatively fast results and a slightly blurred, painterly image. Pictorialist photographers around the turn of the century looked back to these early processes, admiring the grainy textures and rich tonality that signaled artistic expression; photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz twice published this print in his celebrated photography journal <em>Camera Work</em>. The image depicts Anna Brownell Jameson, a writer and art historian, in the sort of natural pose Hill excelled at creating.</p> <p>For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: <a href="http://media.artic.edu/stieglitz">The Alfred Stieglitz Collection</a>.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1844
- Medium
- Salted paper print
- Dimensions
- Image: 21 × 15.5 cm (8 5/16 × 6 1/8 in.); Paper: 21.8 × 16.2 cm (8 5/8 × 6 7/16 in.); Mount: 35 × 28 cm (13 13/16 × 11 1/16 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- David Octavius Hill
Artist

Printmaking
David Octavius Hill was a Scottish painter and pioneering photographer who, from the 1840s onward, created some of the earliest portrait photographs in collaboration with chemist Robert Adamson. Working in calotype, a paper-based photographic process, Hill and Adamson produced approximately 3,000 images in their Edinburgh studio before Adamson's death in 1848. Hill's subsequent career combined painting with continued photographic practice, establishing him as a foundational figure in early photographic portraiture. His work demonstrates the artistic possibilities of photography at a moment when the medium was still contested as a legitimate art form.
Full artist profile →More
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Departure
1848 · Pen and brown ink on cream laid paper
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1847 · Salted paper print
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Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- David Octavius Hill
- Year
- 1844
- Medium
- Salted paper print
- Dimensions
- Image: 21 × 15.5 cm (8 5/16 × 6 1/8 in.); Paper: 21.8 × 16.2 cm (8 5/8 × 6 7/16 in.); Mount: 35 × 28 cm (13 13/16 × 11 1/16 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1844-040891
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified




