Mrs. Bell of Madras

David Octavius Hill, an accomplished painter of the Scottish countryside and a founding member of the Scottish Academy of Painting, is remembered today primarily for his partnership and collaboration with the photographer Robert Adamson. Together they enjoyed the first artistic success with William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype process, the first negative–positive photographic process on paper.

In 1843 Hill decided to paint a group portrait of the 457 men and women present at the convention in Edinburgh that established the Free Church of Scotland. To help secure the likenesses of this large number of people, he made arrangements with Adamson, who had opened a photography studio at Rock House, Calton Hill, Edinburgh. Hill dealt primarily with the poses and the composition, while Adamson attended to the technical aspects of the calotype. In addition to their work on the painting, they photographed people from all walks of Victorian society, amassing more than 2,500 prints during their six-year collaboration.

Mrs. Bell of Madras was Robert Adamson’s sister. As Isabella Morrison Adamson she married Colonel Oswald Bell of Madras in 1847. Hill and Adamson took this portrait outdoors in bright sunlight to keep the exposure time down to a minute, but they included furniture and other props to simulate an interior. They approached the calotype medium intuitively, creating compositions with broad areas of light and dark that reflected, at the same time, the academic painting traditions of the 1840s.