DAVID OCTAVIUS HILL AND ROBERT ADAMSON | THE REVEREND DOCTOR ABRAHAM CAPADOSE OF THE HAGUE

David Octavius Hill to the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1852 

Deaccessioned by the above, 1975

Hans P. Kraus, Jr., New York, 1988

Abraham Capadose (1795-1874), born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Amsterdam, converted to Christianity in 1822 and became an important figure in the nineteenth-century Jewish Awakening movement in the Netherlands. In 1843, he traveled to Scotland to attend meetings in Edinburgh that would result in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland. In the same year, David Octavius Hill decided to commemorate the signing of the Deed of Demission in a monumental painting which would become known as The Disruption Painting or The First General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, Signing the Act of Separation and the Deed of Demission at Tanfield, Edinburgh 23 May 1843. In this colossal canvas, which took 23 years to complete, Hill depicts 457 people present at, or associated with, this historic event. Hill was introduced to Robert Adamson to aid in this mammoth task; Adamson taught him how to make the photographic portraits used to paint each sitter in the painting. This was a novel idea, and likely the first time photographs were used as the basis for a painting. Hill & Adamson’s photographs of Capadose, whose hand rests on a large Bible, were used to paint the Reverend into the 5-by-12-foot painting.