[Calton Hill, the Dugald Stewart Monument]

Rock House, situated on Calton Hill overlooking an area of Edinburgh known as the New Town. In the mid-1700s plans were drawn up to develop the land to the north, because the city had long outgrown its original medieval boundaries. In contrast to the Old Town's overcrowded layout, the New Town was organized around a spacious grid designed in 1767 by the young architect James Craig (1744-95).

Edinburgh became known as the "Athens of the North" during the early years of the nineteenth century due to the Neoclassical designs of the architect William Henry Playfair (1789-1857), who built two memorials on Calton Hill. The National Monument, the largest structure on the hill, commemorates the Napoleonic Wars. A reproduction of the Parthenon, it was begun in 1822 and remains unfinished. This calotype shows the second memorial, a smaller, circular temple dedicated to the great Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), who was a leading figure during the Enlightenment.

In 1792 Stewart published Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, a treatise that begins with a discussion on sight. Stewart, like the philosopher David Hume (1711-76) before him, was particularly interested in perception as a means of understanding the world, believing that one could not focus on everything but was limited to specific details. A visual illustration of this discourse was found in portrait paintings by Allan Ramsay (1713-84) and Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823), where the focus was on the face and less on the surroundings, which were often rendered in cursory brush strokes. Such associations between philosophy and art were quite profound in Scotland. When photography was introduced, its relationship to these sight and perception ideas was surely comprehensible to many. Thus the calotypes of Hill and Adamson (David Octavius Hill [1802-70] and Robert Adamson (1821-48]) not only continued in the tradition of portraiture, they also touched on the philosophical concerns of the late eighteenth century.

Anne M. Lyden. Hill and Adamson, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 44. ©1999, J. Paul Getty Museum.

For more information about the places Hill and Adamson photographed see: “Hill and Adamson: Place��.