Leaves from a journal; elevated prose

Abstract

Abstract Like many of his eminent contemporaries, Lord Patrick Robertson (1794 – 1855) sat in 181:4 for a portrait,1 to be produced by the then only recently introduced calotype process (figure 1). The practitioners of this process in Scotland were the well-known portrait painter David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, whose elder brother, Dr John Adamson, had been introduced to it by Sir David Brewster. The partnership of Hill and Adamson, formed in 1843, represented the only major competition to Fox Talbot's Reading establishment.2