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The Old Masters of Photography

By ALVIN LANGDON COBURN

F there is still a romance about photography to-day, when it has become firmly established as a civilized necessity, and when it has filtered oddly into the most unexpected corners of our social structure, what must have been the sensations of David Octavius Hill when, in 1843, he made his first artistic portrait? When we think that it was only eight years before, in 1835, that Daguerre had first achieved his success, and that he did not publish the details of his process until 1839, and when we realize that the process of photography which Hill practised (that of calotype) was at the time only two years old, we must be thankful for, but at the same time impressed by, the strangeness of a fate that gave us thus early a master in photography as a means of personal expression.

Hill was a painter, a member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and having set himself the task of a very large historical group to contain over four hundred portraits, he was advised by his friend Sir David Brewster to adopt the process of photography to help him in his work. He obtained the assistance of one Robert Adamson, a young chemist of St. Andrew's, who was familiar with the mysteries and manipulations of cameras and chemicals, and under these conditions began making the remarkable series of portraits. Gradually he became interested in photography for its own sake, and made a number of landscapes and figure studies for the sheer joy of so doing. His landscapes include a most interesting negative

of the Scott memorial in the process of building, and many other examples of Edinburgh and St. Andrew's architecture; but his fame rests on the series of portraits of the eminent men and women of his day who sat to him, of which John Ruskin, then a young man, is one of the most strikingly interesting.

I have visited his old studio on the slopes of the Calton Hill in Edinburgh and inspected various pieces of his cumbersome apparatus, and I have been struck with wonder how, with the facilities at his command and waxed paper negatives "requiring five minutes' exposure in bright sunlight with a stop half an inch in diameter," he was able to achieve his results. The strong, clearly cut profile of the "Self Portrait" gives one a clue to the man's character. It is a determined face, as well as an artistic one, showing the fine blend of dreamer and worker so necessary for accomplishment in art. And often in the twilight I have walked up to the crest back of his old studio and imagined how Hill must have done so many times while he lived. I can picture him brushing his fine locks back from his forehead as he looked out over the Edinburgh that Stevenson celebrates in his "Picturesque Notes." It spreads out before one, and as the dusk gathers, "the plan of the city. and her suburbs is mapped out upon the ground of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes and exposes it before a candle; not the darkest night of winter can conceal her high station and fanciful design; every evening in

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teresting way. I was having tea one afternoon in a street near the British Museum with a friend wise in book-lore when we were joined in our corner by a tall acquaintance of his, and the talk turned, as it often happens to do when I am of the company, to the work of Hill.

"But," said the new-comer, "do you know of the photographs of Dr. Keith?" At once I was all attention, for he looked the sort of man who uttered truths. No, I did not know of Dr. Keith. Then I

was told that his photographs were "as good in their way as Hill's," and I lost no time in writing to Dr. Keith's family to inquire if I might by any chance be permitted to look over such prints as they possessed.

I received in reply a most kind letter, asking me to call on a certain afternoon, and imagine my joy when the Misses. Keith spread out before me not only several large volumes of beautiful prints, but also negatives! They were paper nega

tives, made by an improved calotype proc- ess that the curious will find described in "Chambers Information for the People,' Vol. II, p. 780. I begged to be allowed. to borrow some of the negatives, and the prints that I made from them were shown at the exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society in London last year. To the best of my knowledge and belief, these were the first things of Dr. Keith's to be publicly shown. Afterward they were included in the exhibition of photographic old masters which I arranged at the Ehrich Galleries, New York, in December of the same year, and they are now first reproduced in THE CENTURY MAG

AZINE.

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The earliest date I can find on any the Keith negatives or prints is 1854, so that he undoubtedly was working in Edinburgh at the same time as Hill. The two were known to be friends, and prints by Hill are to be found in Dr. Keith's albums.

Dr. Keith's photographs are almost wholly of architecture and landscape. There are a few portraits, but it is the "Old Edinburgh" series that stand out as his most remarkable achievement with the camera. He may have learned his first rudiments from the same young chemist that Hill did, but with his scientific knowledge he at once started experimenting and perfecting, so that his results have a quality that it is not possible to improve upon to this day.

Of Dr. Keith's work as a surgeon I am not competent to write, but the fact that he made a journey to America for the purpose of performing an operation, and returned without having done so because he felt that the patient would recover without the necessary risk of the knife, shows the sterling character of the man. Dr. Keith was born in 1827; he therefore be-. gan to photograph at about the age of twenty-seven. In all he must have used a camera about five or six years, for he gave it up altogether when his surgical work came to be the activity of his life. When one thinks of the suffering he alleviated in his later years, it is perhaps self

ish to wish that he might have given us a few more beautiful prints; nevertheless, as a photographer, I cannot help wishing that now and then he might have devoted a day or two of his busy later life to this side of his activities. Perhaps it would be better to be thankful for the work that he did do. Dr. Keith lived to be sixty-eight years of age, so that it would appear from the dates of his birth and death (18271895) that he should be placed chronologically after Mrs. Cameron (18151879), and this would be done but for the fact that she did not begin her work with the camera until she was fifty years of age.

Julia Margaret Cameron was a fortunate woman. She was a friend of Tennyson, and lived close by one of the gates of his estate at Freshwater, Isle of Wight. When interesting people came to visit the poet, Mrs. Cameron photographed them, and her portfolios testify to the quality and the quantity that came.

Mrs. Cameron was an original woman; she never did things quite like other people. When she wanted a house, and failed to find one, she took two cottages and built a tower between them, making them into one. Such was "Dimbola." One of her daughters, when she was married, sent her mother a camera. "It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater," was the message which accompanied the gift.

Mrs. Cameron possessed perseverance, a love of human nature, and an irrepressible personality. She found in the camera an outlet for her creative energies exactly suited to her temperament. That she impressed herself upon her eminent sitters, as well as impressed them upon her plates, is evident from the frequent occurrence of her name in their biographies, autobiographies, and reminiscences. What an interesting atmosphere you get by the perusal of the lives of Tennyson, Watts, Sir Henry Taylor, Aubrey de Vere, Carlyle, Darwin, and others in the list of her friends! I say advisedly her friends, for it was impossible to resist her kindly frankness and enthusiasm. During a long

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"Lewis Carroll" (The Rev. C. L. Dodgson), photographed by himself

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