Scope and Contents
Album produced by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson and either given or sold to
Clarkson Stanfield in 1845. Book boards covered with maroon leather embossed with an
identical pattern on both the front and back. Leather on spine embossed: I00 / CALOTYPE / SKETCHES., D. O. HILL, RSA. / and / R.ADAMSON., EDINBURGH I845.. End sheets are marbleized paper.
Most pages still have interleaving sheets. While the title of the album suggests
there are 100 images contained, the album actually contains 109 salted paper prints
most with inscriptions provided by either Hill or Adamson. The images are of
prominent men and women of the day, friends and acquaintances of Hill and Adamson,
and scenes of Edinburgh, Newhaven, and St. Andrews, and Scottish architecture and
art. The nine additional images can explained in several ways. First, six images
cover/originally covered other images. It appears that Hill and Adamson did not like
their original choice of several images, and later mounted different images over the
originals. In most cases, the covered image is very similar to another image in the
album (compare 964:0048:0044, a covered image, with 964:0048:0045). Second, the
first two images in the book appear on the half-title and title page, and therefore
may not have been counted as part of the 100
referred to in the title page. And, a third explanation may be that the cover for
the album was printed before Hill and Adamson's selection of images to be included.
For more information regarding this collection, please refer to the Visual Materials
Database (available on-site).