Art: Calotypist Hill

Last week one of the greatest of all portrait photographers had a one-man exhibition at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. To modern camera fans the 40-odd sepia-colored pictures in this exhibition looked like the rich-toned etchings of an old master.

Most of them were portraits of people with strong, lined faces, gnarled hands, who dressed in prim, sober costumes. Some depicted demure-looking children. All of them were taken nearly a hundred years ago. The photographer who had made them had died in his native Scotland in 1870 without ever having seen a modern film or darkroom. But he had caught the dour, moody characters of his sitters with a Rembrandt-like vividness that no present-day camera artist has ever surpassed. His name: David Octavius Hill.

When Photographer Hill started taking pictures in the 18405, photography was as new and primitive as television is today. The Frenchman, Louis Jacques Daguerre had just astonished the world by making the first photographs on chemically treated plates. In Manhattan Samuel F. B. Morse, who had just invented the telegraph, was busy on the roof of New York University making new-fangled “sun pictures.” Morse’s models, faces whitened with powder, had to sit immobile for half an hour in the sunlight, before their likenesses registered in his primitive camera.

An English scientist, Fox Talbot, had finally managed to evolve a transparent negative, a flimsy sheet of waxed paper from which, for the first time, prints could be reproduced. Talbot called his new kind of photograph the calotype. Taking Talbot’s idea, Hill got technical assistance from a young chemist named Robert Adamson, set up a photographic studio in the heart of Edinburgh.

Like Daguerre and Morse, Photographer Hill was an artist. With tireless ingenuity and unfailing taste, he studied the character of his sitters, posed them in natural positions, supervised every detail of clothing and lighting so as to make pictures that were beautiful as well as true to life.

Photographer Hill’s technical problems were enormous. His camera was a homemade, boxlike contraption with a shutter that was pulled open and pushed shut by hand. Its exposures lasted from two to six minutes. To get his subjects to sit still so long he propped their arms and torsos comfortably on heavy, leather-bound books, canes, chair arms and the edges of tables. Because staring eyes would spoil his pictures, he photographed most people with downcast eyes. Unable to take a picture except in broad sunlight, he constructed “interiors” out of doors with the aid of curtains and furniture.

The incomplete transparency and fibrous texture of his negatives gave all his prints a slightly fuzzy look. Retouching and darkroom development tricks were unknown. But despite all these drawbacks, Hill created pictures that rivaled the finest mezzotints, made cravats, lace collars and deep-lined faces shimmer before shadowy backgrounds in a variety of contrasted tones that rouse the envy of photographers whose film today is 100,000 times as sensitive as his.

Hill, born in 1802, the son of a well-to-do Perth publisher, learned lithography as a youth, moved to Edinburgh at 19 to study painting. He soon became known as a landscapist who specialized in sentimental Scottish sunsets and vine-covered castles. He might have lived and died an undistinguished painter but his ambition got the better of him. When, in 1843, some 200 Scottish church dignitaries revolted against the established Presbyterian Church and set up the independent Free Church of Scotland, fervent Churchgoer Hill decided to immortalize the event on canvas. The picture he planned was 57 feet square and was to contain lifelike portraits of nearly 500 prominent people who had attended the meeting.

So gigantic was the task of assembling the sitters for all these likenesses that Hill turned to photography as a help, planning to copy the painted portraits from photographs he had taken at leisure. It took Hill nearly all the rest of his life to finish the painting. Today it hangs in .the Presbytery Hall of Edinburgh’s Free Church of Scotland, forgotten by the art world. But the pictures Painter Hill took while painting it have made him famous.