Hommage to David Octavius Hill?
PURSEY, Thomas.
The last General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland.
A photographic tour-de-force, assembling many hundreds of individual photographic portraits neatly incorporated into a painted scenario, and then reproduced as a photogravure, depicting all the attendees of the last General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, held in May 1900. Evidently a few portraits were unobtainable, or sitters refused to take part, those figures shown facing away from the camera. Pursey must have been basing his project on the work of David Octavius Hill commemorating the first General Assembly of the church in 1843. Hill’s painting, which took twenty-two years to complete, is ‘often considered the first work of art to ever have been painted with the help of photographic images’ (Gossman, Thomas Annan of Glasgow) – portraits and groups taken in Hill and Adamson’s own studio.
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