Can you help? The Signet Library is conducting research into an album of calotype prints in its collections, originally collected in the late nineteenth century by the psychologist and archaeologist Sir Arthur Mitchell and now on deposit with the National Records of Scotland. The vast majority of the prints are Hill, Adamson and Jessie Mann productions, supplemented by a pair of the carbon prints produced for Andrew Elliot.
The album contains this portrait of the Scottish Free Church leader David Maitland Makgill Crichton (1801-1851):
This portrait (National Records of Scotland GD492/62 image 27) is absent from "Stevenson" (David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson: catalogue of their calotypes taken between 1843 and 1847 in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery by Sara Stevenson (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1981). However, costume and background indicate that this image was taken during the same sitting as the very similar Stevenson David Maitland Makgill Crichton d.
However, we have been unable to find further examples of the Signet Library variant shown here.
If anyone is aware of further examples, we'd love to hear from them! Either a comment below or an email to james[at]wssociety[dot]co[dot]uk would be ideal.
(The annotation on the portrait is in Sir Arthur Mitchell's hand)
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