The Divine Solar Art
In the Garden Where Photography Disrupted the World
Steve McQueen’s Resistance show at the Turner Contemporary in Margate charts “how protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest” from 1903 onwards. This week, I go back further, to 1843, and the pivotal event where a protest (by Protestants) pioneered documentary photography in Britain. I have created a new photographic work, revealed at the end of this post.
A black iron gate stands against the rock. Thousands miss it every day as they process up Calton Hill for the quintessential and much-photographed sunset view across Edinburgh. Few would even notice the wee orange building in the foreground of these pictures, and the compact garden where a cutting-edge technology disrupted how we see and know. Did you scroll past it too?
I was given special access to spend time in this historic site, to witness what early pioneers of photography saw, and to share what happened there with you.
Rock of Ages Past
Unlocking the gate, I climbed the short shadowy stairs carved in the volcanic extrusion that is Calton Hill. The setting resembles a stone tomb through which you rise into the light-filled courtyard of Rock House. This is the solid foundation on which photography in its infancy developed from curiosity to art form.
When news broke of the French Daguerrotype in 1839, Englishman Henry Fox Talbot rushed to publish his alternative but then flawed method. Once refined he patented the calotype in 1841 – the first negative–positive method of photography, named after the Greek for ‘beautiful’, kalos, and ‘impression’, typos. Talbot’s method was superior in allowing the printing of multiple images from one negative.
Talbot’s new technique created a stir as he shared his findings with others across Britain. But it would be here at Rock House in Edinburgh, beyond the reach of patent laws, that painter David Octavius Hill and chemist Robert Adamson would live and work together to refine the ‘divine solar art’, as engineer James Nasmyth described it. Hill and Adamson’s work and experimentation showed photography’s potential to transform how we see every aspect of human life.
Cities on the Hills
A Harvard architecture graduate once said to me on first seeing Edinburgh that it was a city uniquely dominated by ideas hewn in stone. High above the Rock House garden, grand ideas were made manifest.
Calton Hill, on which Rock House stands, was a locus for artistic, scientific and philosophical endeavour, with an observatory, a maritime signal and a 1:1 folly replica of the Greek Parthenon – all embodiments of the Scottish Enlightenment’s longing for a new Golden Age, and of Edinburgh’s development as ‘the Athens of the North’.
The new Athens was set upon a hill, but the surrounding skyline was punctuated by spires pointing upwards to another city – the New Jerusalem. These grand visions created a unique atmosphere in the country at this time. Photography was a perfect addition to Edinburgh’s centuries-long tradition of reformation. Reforming vision itself.
To See From This World to the Next
In the 18th century, Scotland was a global beacon of new thinking, with five universities compared to England’s two. The Protestant Reformation had revolutionised the country, bringing in universal education, redistribution of wealth, localised democracy through parishes and rejection of distant church government. But Protestants will protest, and it was into this atmosphere of debate and dissent that new ideas bubbled up and were tested.
In 1843, hundreds of evangelical ministers broke from the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church of Scotland. The Great Disruption not only tore apart the national kirk but was felt in every parish at home and abroad. This was not a quibbling over doctrine but rather a question of where power should reside, with the dissidents rejecting the right of wealthy landowning parish patrons to install ministers of their own choice.
To mark the occasion, David Octavius Hill announced he would record the scene of the Disruption in a painting which would include all 450 ministers involved. The new invention of photography was perfect to quickly record the likenesses of the ministers. Many of the ministers sat for calotypes made in Rock House garden studio. In this way, a significant news moment combined with artistic ambition brought a new innovation – documentary photography – to the fore. Hill eventually finished the painting – the first to be made with the help of photography – decades later, in 1866.
Director general of the National Galleries of Scotland, Anne Lyden, writes of Hill’s Disruption painting,
“The framework around the giant canvas reads: ‘Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness’ (Psalms 112:4), which is the perfect metaphor for photography itself.”
I concur.
A House of Light
It is clear that Rock House’s location and south-facing aspect were ideal for harnessing the sun in Scotland. Even in February, as I sat writing in Rock House, the site was blessed with abundant light, and the sun blazed into the dining room. In other rooms, light projected through elegant Georgian window frames, casting plaid patterns on the walls.
On a bright day, perhaps only a few seconds would be needed to make a calotype, while on an overcast Scottish summer’s afternoon, taking an image might require a minute or more. For Hill and Adamson, the relatively sheltered garden at Rock House also prevented top hats blowing away during the slow exposures, which was recognised an issue in other outdoor city studios. Even then the photographic season here was limited by bad weather, low light, poor health and financial constraints.
Bridging Past, Present and Future
The vista from the front of Rock House spans from Arthur’s Seat on the left to the Castle straight in front, passing through the Old Town. To the right, on the other side of Calton Hill, is the New Town. By the 1840s, the gap between the medieval Old Town and the Georgian New Town was being bridged physically and metaphorically by the writer and historian Sir Walter Scott. The new train station, named Waverley after Scott’s famous romantic fiction, united the central valley and the adjacent Scott Monument were rising in front of Rock House. Scott’s life work had been to weave together the strands of history and myth to consolidate a new, unified Scottish identity. Now his name was being immortalised in the architectural fabric of Edinburgh itself.
Hill and Adamson were able to use photography to document this transition point in Edinburgh’s history, and I hope to write more about this in a future post.
Based at Rock House, Hill and Adamson’s hugely productive four-year partnership and experimentation with photography would yield thousands of artistic portraits as well as documentary photographs of everyday people and buildings. They showed that the new medium could document significant current affairs through acts of imagination that transcended the present moment.
A Past Preserved
Today, little has changed in the landscape since Hill’s poignant painting In Memoriam: The Calton, made after the untimely death of his friend and collaborator Robert Adamson in 1848. In the foreground stands Rock House, with Calton cemetery and Old Town shining behind in the light.
Sara Stevenson describes the painting beautifully in her book Printed Light:
Hill’s painting is a memorial tribute to Robert Adamson and their partnership. Adamson’s camera is set up on the dark slope of Calton Hill to the left and Hill’s easel is in the light ‘studio’ garden of Rock House on the right, balancing the opposite sides of the picture as the opposites of death and life. The small figure coming through the doorway onto the path may be carrying the big camera. The composition moves down into the Calton burial ground, a ‘Valley of Death’ symbolic of Adamson’s passing rather than his actual resting place (he was buried in St Andrews). The eye is then drawn up past the lit cross of salvation on a grave to the south where the city of Edinburgh is painted filled with misty light as a real symbol of the heavenly city and the resurrection.
Hill, a widower, and his only surviving child Charlotte, or Chatty, soon moved away from Rock House, and Hill returned to painting. In the above work, we see not only the home’s vista but the worldview that drove the divine solar art, the intellectual and physical inspirations as well as the personal relationships which allowed Hill and Adamson, and us, to see their times and beyond.
Unless otherwise stated, all photographs © Kieran Dodds 2025.