FROM A PRINT BY ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
SELF-PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPH—By D. O. Hill
PHOTOGRAPHY
Portraits by D. O. Hill
TWO
David Octavius Hill (born 1802, died 1870), was a Scotch painter who conceived the idea of producing a great historical picture representing the Disruption of the Church of Scotland. This work involved painting some four or five hundred portraits, and Hill, despairing of obtaining satisfactory sittings from so many persons, turned to the newly discovered art of photography to furnish the portraits he needed, with the idea of using the photographs as a guide in painting. Hill used the calotype process, invented by Fox Talbot, which rendered a piece of paper sensitive to light by coating it with iodide of silver. When it was exposed in the camera and developed, a negative resulted, and positive prints were made from this negative in the same medium.
Hill became so much interested in photography that he worked with it for several years, to the neglect of his painting. During those years he produced photographic portraits which have certainly never been surpassed, and which some people think have never been equalled. The exposures necessary were very long—four or five minutes in bright sunlight. This fact lends a great deal of beauty to the results, for there is no doubt that full sunlight gives effects that cannot be obtained in any other way, and these may be of surpassing beauty, provided the photographer is skilful enough to manage his apparatus and pose the sitter properly. It is regrettable that so many photographers of the present day shun out-door portraiture, for there is unquestionably a great opportunity in that class of work. The claim of some photographers that out-door light is not satisfactory for portraiture is refuted by Hill’s results.
Hill was not a great painter. His works in that medium are well-nigh forgotten, but he was unquestionably a man of great sensitiveness, who possessed the quality of psychic insight so necessary to a portrait worker. It is the estimate of an authority that, though he could never be compared with the great masters of portraiture, Rembrandt and Velasquez, nevertheless his works are entitled to a place in the second rank.
Hill was especially fortunate in his sitters, for the men and women that he photographed were persons whom it would be difficult to render commonplace in appearance, among them being Christopher North (Professor John Wilson), J. G. Lockhart, Lady Ruthven, Robert Haldane, William Henning, Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson, and others of equal note in Great Britain.
The paper negatives made by Hill are carefully preserved. The writer is fortunate in the possession of prints from two of these negatives. The reproduction shown herewith, a gum-platinum plate made and given to him by Alvin Langdon Coburn, is from one of them. Much of the beauty of this example of Hill’s work is due to modern printing methods, but the quality in this negative, brought out in the print, proves undeniably that Hill merits recognition as a master of portraiture.