Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
The son of a tenant farmer at Burnside, in his youth Adamson excelled at mathematics in nearby St. Andrews. His facility with mechanics indicated a promising career in engineering, but fragile health barred this path. In 1839 his older brother John Adamson eagerly took up photography with Sir David Brewster, and Robert soon followed into the rapidly developing world of this new art. By the summer of 1842 Brewster reported to Talbot that the young man was becoming highly accomplished in calotypy. On May 10, 1843, Robert established Scotland’s first calotype studio, in Rock House on the side of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. The timing proved fortuitous, for nine days later the Disruption took place in the Church of Scotland, when more than four hundred ministers were separated from their livings for forming the Free Church of Scotland. It was through David Octavius Hill’s ambition to commemorate this event in a painting that calotypy took its first real foothold in the public consciousness. With Hill facing the impossibility of rapidly recording hundreds of ministers before they dispersed throughout Scotland, Brewster suggested Adamson’s photography as a facile way to make preliminary “sketches” of the clergymen. The partnership of Adamson and Hill blossomed from this initial collaboration, and their calotypes, originally intended only as drafts, began to take on a life of their own. The partners’ reputation grew rapidly and their subject matter soon extended into general portraiture, architecture, and social documentation. Within a year, Rock House had become the aesthetic center of paper negative photography in the mid-1840s, certainly in Britain, perhaps in the world. The pair completed at least three thousand calotypes before Adamson’s chronic ill health finally asserted itself. He died in St. Andrews on January 14, 1848, at the age of twenty-seven. Hill continued in photography, but he never again achieved the creative heights that he had in his work with Adamson.