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Mathew Brady Today in History (The Library of Congress)
From the first, I regarded myself as under obligation to my country to preserve the faces of its historic men and mothers.
Mathew Brady
Abraham Lincoln: Before Delivering His Cooper Union Address, New York, New York
Mathew B. Brady, photographer, February 27, 1860.
Prints and Photographs Division
Brady, the Photographer, Returned from Bull Run. July 22, 1861.
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865
Mathew Brady photographed presidential aspirant Abraham Lincoln before his February 27, 1860 speech at Cooper Union in New York. Harper's Weekly published Brady's image as a woodcut on its cover with a biographical profile of Lincoln and the title Hon. Abram Lincoln, of Illinois, Republican Candidate for President. [Photographed by Brady.]
When he became President Marshal Lamon said: "I have not introduced Mr. Brady." Mr. Lincoln answered in his ready, "Mr. Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President." I remember when I took Mr. Lincoln, in 1859, he had no beard. I had to pull up his shirt and coat collar; that was at the Tenth-street gallery.
- Still Taking Pictures: Brady, the Grand Old Man of American Photography, Hard at Work At Sixty-Seven (interview)
The World, April 12, 1891, p.26, Geo. Alfred Townsend ("Gath".)
M.B. Brady's New Photographic Gallery, Corner of Broadway and Tenth Street, New York, A. Berghaus.
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865
Brady's Daguerrean Gallery, ca. 1854.
America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864
Brady studied photography under Samuel F. B. Morse, a friend of Louis-Jacques-Mand Daguerre who had recently introduced the daguerreotype process to America. In 1844, Brady opened his own elegant gallery and studio on Broadway in New York City. He excelled at portraiture and actively sought sittings with prominent figures in the spheres of art and politics.
At the advent of the Civil War, Brady recognized the historical imperative of comprehensive documentation of the conflict. In spite of the inevitable physical and financial perils and risks, Brady organized a corps of photographers and assistants to document the characters, events, and settings of the battles of the war:
My wife and my most conservative friends had looked unfavorably upon this departure from commercial business to pictorial war correspondence, and I can only describe the destiny that overruled me by saying that, like Euphorion, I felt I had to go. A spirit in my feet said "Go," and I went.
Still Taking Pictures (interview)
He supervised his large corps of talented traveling photographers and preserved their negatives, augmenting the images with others which he bought from private photographers freshly returned from the battlefield, always seeking to tell the sweeping saga of history as it occurred. When photographs from his collection—which were, in fact, the work of many people—were published, whether printed by Brady or adapted as engravings in publications, they were credited "Photograph by Brady."
In his endeavors to share the images of the war with the public, Brady shocked many by displaying photographs of battlefield corpses from Antietam. He posted a sign on the door of his New York gallery which read, "The Dead of Antietam."
Brady succeeded in his goal of truly comprehensive photo-documentation of a war, but he paid a great price for his collection. He had risked his fortune on the Civil War enterprise and fell into bankruptcy. Brady said, "No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives. The world can never appreciate it. It changed the whole course of my life." He died in poverty in 1896. The New York Seventh Regiment Veterans Association paid a portion of his funeral expenses.
Go into the Gallery when you may and you will see crowds gather around these pictures, some with tearful eyes, some with eyes that brim with pride and all with swelling hearts. To one who has moved in the scenes represented, these pictures are pregnant with strange, sad reminiscences…You recognize the very sycamore to whose base a young Lieutenant had crawled to die. You knew him…
Undated clipping, Mathew Brady Scrapbook, Brady/Handy Collection, Library of Congress
Brady's Photo Outfit in Front of Petersburg, Virginia, circa 1864.
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865
Gen. Potter and Staff of Seven…Also Mr. Brady, Photographer. Mathew Brady Studio, photographer, circa 1863.
If the men themselves whose physiognomies are here displayed, would but meet together for half an hour in as calm a frame of mind as their pictures wear, how vastly all the world's disputes would be simplified; how many tears and troubles might mankind still be spared!
Portrait of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Officer of the Federal Army.
Mathew Brady, photographer, Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, Washington, D.C., between 1860 and 1865.
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865
And why should they not? For here at one end of the grand saloon behold a company of famous men who have in very truth so met. These are the dead of history.
- "A Broadway Valhalla: Opening of Brady's New Gallery,"
American Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts & Sciences, n.s., 3, no. 10 (October 15, 1860): 151-53.
- Search the collection Civil War Photographs, 1861-186 on camera or photographic wagon to view images of the field equipment and facilities which photographers used during the Civil War.
- The Special Presentation Time Line of the Civil War provides a year-by-year overview of the Civil War.
- Mathew Brady's and his colleague's photographs document the sites and the carnage of the battles of the war quite powerfully. However, due to the long exposure times necessary to make readable images, capturing action on film was difficult if not impossible. The public relied on images rendered by sketch artists, printed in the news publications of the day, to get a sense of the battles.
The American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition contains examples of the work of sketch artist Alfred Waud ventured dangerously close to the fighting to eloquently fix on paper information which could not be captured by cameras at that time. Among the images in the collection is a sketch entitled Attack of the Louisiana Tigers on a Battery of the 11th Corps at Gettysburg which depicts an attack on the first day of the Gettysburg battle.
- America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotypes, 1839-1862 includes the largest collection in existence of daguerreotypes from the studio of Mathew Brady.
Walt Whitman, three-quarter length portrait, facing left, right hand under head, Mathew Brady, photographer, 1875.
Prints and Photographs Division- The Special Presentation Mirror Images: Daguerreotypes at the Library of Congress provides an introduction to the Library's daguerreotype collection. See the Timeline of the Daguerreian Era to learn more about the period.
- Descriptions of the process developed by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and the equipment used by daguerreotype photographers are included in The Daguerreotype Medium; to find them, scroll down to the appropriate headings.
- For more daguerreotypes, see two online exhibitions: Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype from the National Museum of American Art and Daguerreotypes at Harvard from the extensive photograph collections of Harvard University and Radcliffe.
- Search the Today in History Archive on Civil War to locate features highlighting:
- General Lee's evacuation of Richmond;
- Military engagements at Bull Run, Gettysburg, Nashville, and Antietam; and
- Other key figures from the Civil War era such as Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson as well as Civil War era events including Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the execution of Andersonville Prison's Henry Wirz.
- See other Today in History features on photographers including éLouis-Jacques-Mand Daguerre, Samuel Herman Gottscho, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Carl Van Vechten.
Photographer Mathew B. Brady, Three-Quarter Length Portrait, Facing Front.
Levin C. Handy, photographer, 1889.
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865
Still Taking Pictures (interview)
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