Even before 1839 Scots had built up the knowledge and the connections to realise its potential.

Almost as soon as Sir David Brewster, one of Scotland’s greatest physicists, heard of Talbot’s discovery he wrote immediately asking for details so he could try it for himself. The 19th century successors to the Scotish Enlightenment of the 1700s quickly realised the scientific and technical value of the new art form and embraced it wholeheartedly.

Although early efforts were hampered by the clumsy apparatus and oſten unstable chemistry, the Scots persevered and, two years later, in May, 1842, Dr John Adamson succeeded in taking Scotland’s first portrait calotype (an early photographic process in which negatives were made using paper coated with silver iodide.)

It was Brewster who persuaded Talbot to allow John Adamson’s younger brother, Robert, to set up Scotland’s first photographic studio in Edinburgh in May 1843. In less than four years, before Adamson’s death in 1848, he and his partner Hill took more than 3,000 photographs of Scots and visitors to the country, as well as the first documentary photographs of village life with a series of pictures taken in and around Newhaven in Fife.

The growing expertise of the art in Scotland led to a number of photographers leaving the country to expand their horizons.

Portrait of a horse held by a groom, taken by a photographer of the London School of Photography, based at Newgate Street and Regent Circus, London, 1858-60, quarter- plate ambrotype.

Scotish photographers worked in Canada and America, India, China, New Zealand and elsewhere to create a pictorial history of Victorian life.

The exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in Chambers Street, Edinburgh runs until 22 November.

Dr E W Pritchard, His Wife, Mother-in-Law and Family, by Cramb Brothers, of Glasgow, 1865, carte- de-visite. Edward William Pritchard (1825-65) was notorious for poisoning with antimony his wife and mother-in-law, both seen in this family portrait in happier days. He was the last person to be publicly executed in Glasgow. © Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, carte-de-visite, November 1857, by Robert Howlett, London. © Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland

84 August 2015

‘Balmoral Castle from the N.W’, 1863, by George Washington Wilson, Aberdeen, stereo albumen prints from a wet collodion negative. © Howarth-Loomes Collection at National Museums Scotland