Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Adam, Robert Moyes
Parallel form(s) of name
- Robert Moyes Adam
- R.M. Adam
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1885-1967
History
Born Carluke, Lanarkshire 1885; died Edinburgh 1967
After studying science at Heriot Watt College and drawing at Edinburgh College of Art, Adam started work at RBGE in 1903 preparing lecture illustrations for the Regius Keeper, Isaac Bayley Balfour. In 1914 he was made a permanent member of staff as assistant in charge of the studio and in 1915 promoted to the new post of Photographer and Artist, remaining in this post until his retirement in 1949. He became official artist to the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, but Adam became best known as one of the foremost landscape photographers in Scotland, illustrating publications such as Quigley’s ‘The Highlands of Scotland’, 1936, and publishing pictures regularly in the Scots Magazine, the Scotsman and Picture Post. In the later twentieth Century his mountain photographs have provided conservationists and landscape historians with a reliable historic record of the landscape and rural life. He continued to use his heavy 1908 half plate camera, printing all the photographs himself in a style difficult to replicate today and his negatives are now in the collection of St. Andrews University.
Source: DNB; Bown's '4 Gardens in 1'; Desmond's Dictionary; Fletcher & Brown's 'RBGE 1670-1970'
by D.W.
see also: https://stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/28160