…one need only look at this mysterious portrait of Lady Ruthven to understand that Hill and Adamson possessed not only a profound human sensitivity but also a creative and sophisticated formal sensibility.

This sensuous image of Lady Ruthven (1789-1885) is one of Hill and Adamson’s finest portraits. Standing with her back to the camera, her head slightly turned to the side to reveal the nape of her neck, she is reminiscent of women in paintings by Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). The original print of this image dates from 1847 and was one of the last that Hill and Adamson made together. In a letter Hill wrote to Lady Ruthven in late December of that year, he seems disillusioned and near to giving up photography. Sadly, the partnership did come to an end shortly thereafter when Robert Adamson died, most likely of tuberculosis. In 1905 Alfred Stieglitz published in Camera Work photogravures by James Craig Annan of Hill and Adamson’s calotypes. Annan, who had begun making finely crafted copies of the duo’s work in the 1890s, recognized and appreciated the beauty of the early pictures. He singled out Hill as the creative force behind the photographs, effectively reducing Adamson’s role within the alliance. Nevertheless, Annan’s efforts served to introduce the work of these two nineteeth-century pioneers to a twentieth-century audience. [1]

Both Thomas and his son James Craig Annan had learned the photogravure process directly from Klíč in Vienna in 1883. Klíč sold the British rights to his process to the Annans. James Craig Annan was responsible for a renewed interest in the work of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson when he used their plates to make photogravures that appeared in Camera Work in 1905, 1909, and 1912. In a letter to Paul Strand, Stieglitz mentioned these photogravures, reminding Strand that they were “not reproductions, but photogravures, as permanent as a Dürer or Rembrandt etching” [2]