Scots Guards at Edinburgh Castle (1846): Art, History and Details

Scots Guards at Edinburgh Castle (1846) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is David Octavius Hill (British, 1802–1870); Robert Adamson (British, 1821–1848).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Painted group portraits required each individual to sit for the artist, whereas the camera captured a detailed likeness of each face at once. Photography became an incredibly useful tool for artists tasked with producing group portraits. It was Hill’s desire to paint a contemporary historical event requiring the accurate depiction of more than 450 ministers that led him to contact Adamson, who had just become Edinburgh’s first professional photographer making paper prints. This portrait shows members of the 92nd (Gordon Highlanders) Regiment of Foot.

Object facts

• Title: Scots Guards at Edinburgh Castle
• Date: 1846
• Creator attribution: David Octavius Hill (British, 1802–1870); Robert Adamson (British, 1821–1848)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from calotype negative
• Dimensions: Image: 14 x 19.5 cm (5 1/2 x 7 11/16 in.); Matted: 35.6 x 45.7 cm (14 x 18 in.)
• Collection: PH - British 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1987.17

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1987." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 2 (1988): 30-71.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.
• Tannenbaum, Barbara. "Cheating Death: A look at the first 50 years of portrait photography.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 56, no. 5 (September/October 2016): 8-9.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.