David Octavius Hill

David Octavius Hill (20 May 1802 – 17 May 1870) was a Scottish painter and arts activist. He formed Hill & Adamson studio with the engineer and photographer Robert Adamson between 1843 and 1847 to pioneer many aspects of photography in Scotland.

David Octavius Hill was born in 1802 in Perth. His father, a bookseller and publisher, helped to re-establish Perth Academy and David was educated there as were his brothers. When his older brother Alexander joined the publishers Blackwood's in Edinburgh, David went there to study at the School of Design. He learned lithography and produced Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire which was published as an album of views. His landscape paintings were shown in the Institution for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland, and he was among the artists dissatisfied with the Institution who established a separate Scottish Academy in 1829 with the assistance of his close friend Henry Cockburn. A year later Hill took on unpaid secretarial duties. He sought commissions in book illustration, with four sketches being used to illustrate The Glasgow and Garnkirk Railway Prospectus in 1832, and went on to provide illustrations for editions of Walter Scott and Robert Burns.

In the 1830s he is listed as living at 24 Queen Street, a prestigious address in Edinburgh's New Town. In 1836 the Royal Scottish Academy began to pay him a salary as secretary, and with this security he married his fiancée Ann Macdonald in the following year, but she was not strong and after the birth of their daughter, Charlotte Hill, she became an invalid. Charlotte married the author Walter Scott Dalgleish. Ann died on 5 October 1841, aged only 36. She is buried with her family in Greyfriars Churchyard in Perth (not to be confused with the Edinburgh churchyard of the same name).

Hill then spent some twenty years as a bachelor. He continued to produce illustrations and to paint landscapes on commission. During this perion he lived at 28 Inverleith Row in Edinburgh's northern suburbs.

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