TODAY is the 150th anniversary of the death of David Octavius Hill, the artist and pioneering photographer who may well have been the world’s first photoshopper, albeit the image ended up as a painting.

Born in this week on May 20, 1802, Hill was the son of a bookseller and publisher Thomas Hill and his wife Amelia nee Murray, and was given the middle name Octavius to mark the fact that he was their eighth child. Thomas Hill had helped to re-establish Perth Academy and both David and his brothers were educated there.

His immediate elder brother Alexander (1800-66) and he both studied under the landscape artist David Junior (1773-1835), who also taught David’s friends and fellow artists Thomas Duncan RSA ARA (1807-45) and John MacLaren Barclay RSA (1811-86).

At the age of 16, Hill went to Edinburgh to study art, moving in with his brother Alexander who was working at publishers Blackwoods. Alexander would go on to be a publisher himself and is recognised as the most influential fine art publisher of his day.

Hill was soon moving in Edinburgh’s growing artistic and scientific community and his study of lithography led him to successfully publish his landscape paintings in lithograph form as an album called Sketches Of Scenery In Perthshire.

He exhibited his works in the short-lived Institution for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland, but after 1826 he joined the independent artist-run Scottish Academy, now the Royal Scottish Academy, at The Mound in Edinburgh. Hill began to do unpaid secretarial work for the academy under its first president, the painter George Watson. In 1836, Hill became the academy’s formal paid secretary, appointed because of the respect which he already enjoyed among Scottish artists.

From 1831 onwards, Hill took to book illustration for a living and was successful, his illustrations featuring in editions of works by Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, for example.

In 1837, having the security of a salary from the academy, he married Ann Macdonald, but she died in 1841 shortly after giving birth to their daughter Charlotte. Later in life Hill would marry again, his second wife being the painter and sculptress Amelia Paton, whose works included the monumental statue of David Livingstone which stands in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh.

The science and art of photography developed in the 1830s, with the Daguerreotype being the major advance that allows historians to say that photography started in 1839. Two years later, William Henry Fox Talbot introduced the calotype process using paper coated with silver iodide, and the former Church of Scotland minister turned scientist Sir David Brewster (1781-1868) – the inventor of the kaleidoscope among other things – seized on the calotype as the future of photography. One of Brewster’s colleagues and friends at St Andrews University was John Adamson (1809-70), who produced the first calotype portrait in Scotland in 1841.

Adamson’s younger brother Robert (1820-48) took up photography with great enthusiasm, opening his own studio in Edinburgh, Rock House on Calton Hill, and he would play a huge role in the life of Hill. With Scotland in a religious ferment in 1843, Brewster introduced Robert Adamson to Hill just as the Great Disruption was taking place.

With 450 ministers walking out of the General Assembly to form the Free Church of Scotland, Adamson and Hill decided to mark the occasion with an artwork that is one of the most famous paintings in Scottish history and is arguably the first example of photoshopping anywhere in the world.

As keepers of the biggest collection of Hill and Adamson’s works, Glasgow University is the acknowledged “go-to” source for information on the two men. The university’s website explains the significance of their greatest work: “The painting of The First General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland signing the Act of Separation and Deed of Demission on 23rd May, 1843” by David Octavius Hill is internationally important as being the first work of art painted with the help of photographic images. The painting is a commemorative image of the assembly. Hill depicted 457 people associated with it from a total of 1500 present, 386 of whom signed the act that day. The painting measures 4ft 8ins by 12ft and took Hill 23 years to complete.

“Many of the photographs in the University of Glasgow Collection are associated with this project. Hill took reference from both single and group portraits for the picture, and although the painting predominantly features the ministers involved in the Disruption, Hill also includes many women who co-operated in the building up of the Free Church.”

People knew that Hill and Adamson were working on the project and it helped to make them famous, with the two men working out of the Edinburgh studio which was visited by hundreds of people, usually well to do or notable in some way.

With Adamson taking the photographs and Hill doing the composition, both men were also intent on capturing the “real life” of Scotland and, as well as hundreds of landscapes and portraits, they also photographed fishwives at Newhaven and St Andrews and staged “action” photographs of soldiers. Their techniques and poses, devised mainly by Hill, were hugely influential and both men have a rightful place as pioneers of photography.

Adamson’s death at the age of just 26 devastated Hill, who virtually ceased his photographic efforts in 1848. He returned to painting and illustration work but took up photography again in 1860, though without great success.

He finally finished the Disruption painting in 1866 and it was a sensation. A group of subscribers got together and paid the then massive sum of £1200 to donate it to the Free Church, who remain its proud possessors.

Hill took ill in 1869 and had to give up work, dying the following year at the age of 68 and three days.