Mark Napier

In 1843, photographer Robert Adamson established a calotype studio in Edinburgh and subsequently formed an artistic partnership with the well-known Scottish painter David Octavius Hill. Hill and Adamson worked together just over four years, yet they produced some of the most memorable photographs ever made. They explored the genres of landscape, architecture, and portraiture with equal enthusiasm, although it is their portraits that are best known and celebrated in the history of photography. During their collaboration, which lasted until Adamson's death in 1848 at the age of twenty-seven, the two men produced about three thousand calotypes- a photographic technique prized for its handmade, painterly qualities. The calotype negative was exposed onto printing paper soaked in a salt solution, dried, and treated with silver nitrate to create salted paper prints, such as the Oberlin example.

Hill and Adamson's portrait captures the lively personality of Mark Napier (1798- 1879), a lawyer who became deputy sheriff of Dumfriesshire. Napier was a member of Edinburgh's Calotype Club and shared in the widespread enthusiasm and fascination for this newly developed medium. At least five different images of Napier made by Hill and Adamson exist, all of which show the rich brown tones characteristic of salt prints. Photographed in the artists' studio garden at Rock House, Napier is shown seated surrounded by large folios of the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, English dramatists from the early seventeenth century, and J. M. W. Turner's collection of prints, Liber Studiorum. The carefully posed sitter references well-established British portrait-painting traditions and captures Napier's likeness with refreshing immediacy and directness.

Beginning in 1991, and over a period of about four years, funds generously provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation made it possible for the museum to acquire this print and more than forty other important historic and contemporary photographs-including works by Henry Fox Talbot, Peter Henry Emerson, Carleton Watkins, Nan Goldin, Jenny Holzer, and others-greatly expanding the role that photography plays in teaching across the Oberlin curriculum.