Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 11))

The arrangement of the lights and shadows seem rather the result of a
happy haste, in which half the effect was produced by design, half by
accident, than of great labor and care; and yet how exquisitely true the
general aspect! Every stroke tells, and serves, as in the portraits of
Raeburn, to do more than relieve the features: it serves also to indicate the
prevailing mood and predominant power to the mind.”
The experiments were conducted in a house on the Calton Hill, that
classic monumented rock which bounds the eastern vista of Princes Street,
Edinburgh, and would form a fitting Mecca for the future devotees of the
art. Hill speedily became fascinated with the new process, and when he
had photographed the more interesting of the ministers, and many mag-
nificent types there were among them, he forgot the original cause of his
experiments and busied himself portraying the features of the men and
women of intellect in Edinburgh at a period when the northern capital
rivaled the metropolis itself in the force and character of its literary
activity. It was a period also when convention and cosmopolitanism had
not molded the sartorial and tonsorial aspect of the civilized world in
one universal characterless form. Men wore their hair as it pleased them
and their clothes were soft and fitted to their form. Their collars were
unstarched if their stocks were high and uncomfortable, and the general
aspect was infinitely more pictorial than it is to-day. Breeding is said to
be the art of concealing one’s feelings, and so highly has our breeding
developed nowadays that our faces have almost assumed the uniformity
of our clothes. That this was not so in Hill's time is very evident from
his photographs. Take, for example, the portrait of that physical and
mental giant, “Christopher North” (Professor Wilson), with his great
head and massive girth, instinct with power, passive for the moment, but
ready to exert his tremendous force in crushing some poor “rascally
Whig” who had ventured to attack him in the Edinburgh Review. Then
compare with this the portrait of his co-editor of “ Blackwoods,” John
Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott.
Hill has at least four portraits of him which vividly represent his keen,
refined, reserved, intellectual character, and one can readily believe that the
fighting articles which appeared over his nom-de-plume, “The Scorpion,”
were distinctly reminiscent of that creature.
One becomes so fascinated by the interest of the persons who sat to
Hill and by his magnificent characterization of them that it is only as a
secondary consideration that one thinks of the artistic qualities of his
pictures. This is really one of the highest compliments that one could pay
them if it be true that “the greatest art is that which conceals art,” for there
is absolutely no appearance of conscious effort in the arrangement of his
compositions, nor is there any feeling of affectation in the striking attitudes
in which he frequently portrayed his subjects.
He simply photographed his sitters as he did because it satisfied his
instincts at the moment, and it is not unlikely that if he thought of the
matter at all he would expect others to do precisely as he did. It is

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