Tucked into the prefatory note of this 1905 anthology — edited by Charles Holme, founder of The Studio magazine — is a single paragraph that quietly rewrites the origin story of modern image-making:

Mr. Hill was a member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and in the year 1843, at the suggestion of his friend, Sir John Herschel, made use of the, then, new process of photography to aid him in the painting of a picture in which no less than 430 portraits had to be included. So successful was he in his use of the camera that portraits of all the leading Edinburgh people were afterwards produced by him, and he will probably be known in the future as the father of artistic photography.

Think about what's being described. Photography had been publicly announced only four years earlier, in 1839. The daguerreotype was a curiosity, the calotype an experimental stain on salted paper. And here is David Octavius Hill, a working academic painter, faced with the absurd commission of fitting 430 recognizable faces into one canvas (commemorating the 1843 Disruption of the Church of Scotland). Sir John Herschel — the astronomer who would coin the words photograph, negative, and positive — tells him to go use a camera. Hill partners with the chemist Robert Adamson, and the two essentially invent the photographic studio sitting.

What's remarkable is the casualness of the proposal. Herschel didn't pitch photography as art. He pitched it as a productivity tool for portrait painters — exactly the use case that, a century and a half later, would launch entire industries of reference-photo services, FaceApp, and AI image generation. Painters were the first to grasp that capturing a likeness was the bottleneck, not painting it.

And modern evidence backs the claim quietly. The Hill & Adamson archive at the National Galleries of Scotland contains roughly 3,000 calotypes made between 1843 and 1847. The Disruption Picture itself took Hill twenty-three years to finish — a useful reminder that even with the new "AI" of his day, the long tail of the work still belonged to the human hand.

What's been forgotten is the order of operations. We tell schoolchildren that photography killed portrait painting, as if it were an invading species. But for the first generation, photography was painters' assistive technology — commissioned, paid for, and operated by them. The camera worked for the easel before it worked against it.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Every working illustrator now wrestling with whether to use Midjourney for reference plates is replaying Hill's 1843 decision, with the same friend-of-a-scientist nudging them: just use the thing, it'll save you years.