Mathew Brady

For more information on Mathew B. Brady, visit Britannica.com.

(b Warren County, NY, 1823; d New York, 15 Jan 1896). American photographer. At the age of 16 he left his home town and moved to nearby Saratoga. There he learnt how to manufacture jewellery cases and met William Page, who taught him the techniques of painting. Impressed by his ability, Page took Brady to New York in 1841 to study with Samuel F. B. Morse at the Academy of Design, and to attend Morse's school of daguerreotypy; there Brady learnt the details of photographic technique. After experimenting with the medium from 1841 to 1843, Brady set up his Daguerrean Miniature Gallery in New York (1844), where he both took and exhibited daguerreotypes. Very soon he established a considerable reputation and in 1845 won first prize in two classes of the daguerreotype competition run by the American Institute. He concentrated on photographic portraits, especially of famous contemporary Americans, such as the statesman Henry Clay (1849; Washington, DC, Lib. Congr.). In 1847, with his business flourishing, he opened a second studio, in Washington, DC, and in 1850 published his Gallery of Illustrious Americans (New York). These were lithographic portraits of eminent Americans, such as General Winfield Scott and Millard Fillmore, taken from Brady's original daguerreotypes.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The American photographer, publisher, and pictorial historian Mathew B. Brady (ca. 1823-1896) was famous for his portraits of eminent world leaders and his vast photographic documentation of the Civil War.

Mathew B. Brady (he never knew what the initial "B" stood for) was born in Warren County, N.Y. The exact place and year are not known; in later life Brady told a reporter, "I go back near 1823-24." He spent his youth in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and became a friend of the painter William Page, who was a student of the painter and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. About 1839/1840 Brady went to New York City with Page. Nothing certain is known of his activity there until 1843, when the city directory listed his occupation as jewel-case manufacturer.

The daguerreotype process had been introduced to America in 1839, and Morse became one of the first to practice the craft and to teach it. Possibly Brady met Morse through Page, and perhaps he learned to take daguerreotypes from him. In 1843 Brady added cases specially made for daguerreotypes to his line of goods, and a year later he opened a "Daguerreian Miniature Gallery." He was at once successful: the first daguerreotypes he put on public exhibition, at the Fair of the American Institute in 1844, won a medal, and he carried away top honors year after year.

Brady once said that "the camera is the eye of history." He began in 1845 to build a vast collection of portraits, which he named "The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, " and two years later he opened a Washington branch, so that he could have portraits made of the presidents, cabinet ministers, congressmen, and other government leaders.

Brady sent 20 daguerreotypes to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851; they won him a medal and were greatly admired. In that year he traveled to England and the Continent. Shortly after his return he opened a second New York studio. His eyesight was now failing seriously, and he relied more and more upon assistants to do the actual photography. Chief among his many operators was Alexander Gardner, a Scotsman who was well versed in the newly invented collodion, or wet-plate, process, which was rapidly displacing the daguerreotype. Gardner specialized in making enlargements up to 17 by 20 inches, which Brady called "Imperials"; they cost $750 each. Gardner was put in charge of the gallery in Washington in 1858.

Perhaps the most famous of Brady's portraits was the standing figure of Abraham Lincoln taken at the time of his Cooper Union speech in 1861; Lincoln is reported to have said that the photograph and the speech put him in the White House.

When the Civil War broke out, Brady resolved to make a photographic record of it. The project was a bold one. At his own expense he organized teams of photographers - James D. Horan in his biography states that there were 22 of them - each equipped with a traveling darkroom, for the collodion plates had to be processed on the spot. Brady recollected that he spent over $100, 000 and "had men in all parts of the Army, like a rich newspaper."

When the war ended, the collection comprised some 10, 000 negatives. The project had cost Brady his fortune, and he became bankrupt. He could not afford to pay the storage bill for one set of negatives, which were sold at auction to the War Department. A second collection was seized by E. and H. T. Anthony, dealers in photographic materials, for nonpayment of debts. Today Brady's vast and brilliant historical record is divided between the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Although he maintained his Washington gallery, Brady never fully recovered from his financial disasters. In 1895 he planned a series of slide lectures about the Civil War. While he was preparing them in New York, he became ill and entered the Presbyterian Hospital, where he died on Jan. 15, 1896.

Further Reading

James D. Horan, Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera (1955), not only recounts the few known facts of Brady's career but gives a vivid account of life in America and the state of photography in the mid-19th century; Horan was the first biographer to have access to the records of Brady's heirs. Roy Meredith, Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man: Mathew B. Brady (1946), is somewhat conjectural and poorly documented; it is, however, useful for its illustrations. In 1911 the Review of Reviews published the 10-volume The Photographic History of the Civil War, edited by Francis Trevelyan Miller; a 5-volume reprint (1957) contains many Brady pictures.

Brady, Mathew (c.1823-1896), American documentary photographer widely associated with Civil War photography. Samuel Morse was one of several early daguerreotypists who taught him, and Brady had set up as a ‘daguerrean artist’ in New York by 1844. Hampered by failing eyesight, he rarely took photographs himself, but his Broadway studio and gallery attracted prominent citizens, from whose portraits he published a volume of engravings, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, in 1850. His first ‘National Portrait Gallery’, established with Alexander Gardner in 1849 in Washington, DC, failed, but a second attempt in 1856 thrived as he sold wet-collodion portraits of members of Congress, the President, and other notables. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he borrowed to outfit travelling photographic wagons and hire photographers to produce battlefield images. In addition to Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan and George Barnard were among those he employed. He also purchased other photographers' negatives to sell in his studio, and published Brady's Photographic Views of the War, Brady's Album Catalogue, and Incidents of the War, often without crediting the individual photographers. By the war's end, with the managerial assistance of his brother-in-law Samuel Handy, he had accumulated over 7, 000 negative views. Unable to sell prints to a war-weary public, he went bankrupt; in 1875 Congress voted him $25, 000 for his collection, which now forms the core of the ‘Brady-Handy Collection’ of Civil War photographs at the Library of Congress. He died penniless.

— Constance B. Schulz

Bibliography

• Panzer, M., Mathew Brady and the Image of History (1997)

(1823?-1896), photographer. In his portraits of prominent Americans in the late 1840s and 1850s and in the camp and battlefield views made under his aegis during the Civil War, Mathew Brady helped define a role for American photographers as historians of contemporary life. Although he operated a camera himself only infrequently--he was hampered by poor eyesight--he shaped, more effectively than any of his contemporaries, an identity for photography as a force in American society, politics, and culture.

In 1839, the same year Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced his invention of photography in Paris, the young Brady arrived in New York City from his upstate New York home where he had been born to Irish parents. After a brief stint as a clerk in the A. T. Stewart department store and a few years as a manufacturer of jewelry cases (including cases for daguerreotypes), he opened a daguerreotype portrait studio at the corner of Broadway and Fulton streets in 1844. In the growing competition among professional daguerreotypists Brady became expert in advertising himself and attracting prominent sitters. "Brady of Broadway" became the most widely recognized and admired photographic trademark of the antebellum era.

The inaugural issue of the Photographic Art-Journal in 1851 described him as the "fountainhead" of the young profession of portrait photography. In the same year he was awarded one of three gold medals for daguerreotypes at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London (the other two also went to Americans). In the 1850s his trade, now including paper prints, expanded rapidly; he moved his gallery into more sumptuous quarters uptown and in 1858 opened a branch in Washington, D.C. With his portraits of public figures appearing regularly as engravings in the national press, Brady had immense influence on the times. His famous Cooper Union portrait of Abraham Lincoln during the presidential campaign of 1860 contributed in no small way to making Lincoln a popular figure.

But Brady's greatest success lay in his organization of a corps of Civil War photographers who followed the armies and produced an incomparable firsthand record of the war years. The pictures he acquired and published represent one of the greatest collective depictions in photography of a major historical event. Brady, however, never recovered from the loss of the private fortune he invested in this project, and his career declined precipitously during the Gilded Age. When he died in 1896 he was close to destitution.

Although he made no profit from it in his lifetime, his collection of Civil War pictures, including many antebellum portraits of prominent figures of the war years, finally made its way into national archives, where it remains the chief source of visual information about the period and the war. Interest in Mathew Brady revived in the 1930s, and his work exerted a major influence on the documentary movement in photography in the depression era.

Bibliography:

James D. Horan, Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera (1955); Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt, Mathew Brady and His World (1977).

Author:

Alan Trachtenberg

See also Photography.

Mathew B. Brady
Mathew B. Brady, self-portrait, circa 1875
Born	1822 Warren County, New York, U.S.A.
Died	January 15, 1896 (aged 73) New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Occupation	Photographer, photojournalist
Nationality	United States
Spouse(s)	Juliette Handy Brady
Signature

Note: Mathew B. Brady's name contains a single "t". For persons named Matthew Brady, see Matthew Brady (disambiguation).

Mathew B. Brady (1822 – January 15, 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and the documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism.^[1]

Contents 1 Early years 2 Civil War documentation 3 Later years and death 4 Legacy and people photographed 5 In popular culture 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links

Early years

Brady was born in Warren County, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, Andrew and Julia Brady. He moved to New York City at the age of 16. Beginning in 1841, Brady's artistic aptitude allowed him to study under the skilled daguerreotypist Samuel F. B. Morse.^[2] By 1844, he had his own photography studio in New York, and by 1845, Brady began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans. He opened a studio in Washington, D.C. in 1849, where he met Juliette Handy, whom he married in 1851. Brady's early images were daguerreotypes, and he won many awards for his work; in the 1850s ambrotype photography became popular, which gave way to the albumen print, a paper photograph produced from large glass negatives most commonly used in the American Civil War photography. In 1850, Brady produced The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portrait collection of prominent contemporary figures. The album, which featured noteworthy images like an elderly Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, was not financially rewarding but invited increased attention to Brady’s work and artistry.^[3] In 1859, Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri popularized the carte de visite and these small pictures (the size of a visiting card) rapidly became a popular novelty as thousands of these images were created and sold in the United States and Europe.

In 1856 Brady created the first modern advertisement when he placed an ad in the New York Herald paper offering to produce "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes."^[4] His ads were the first whose typeface and fonts were distinct from the text of the publication and from that of other advertisements.^[5]

Civil War documentation

efforts to document the Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio right onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the obvious dangers, financial risk, and discouragement of his friends, Brady is later quoted as saying "I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'Go,' and I went." His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he got so close to the action that he only just avoided being captured.

Mathew Brady upon his return from the First Battle of Bull Run, wearing a saber given to him for defense by New York Fire Zouaves^[6]

Photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken by Brady on February 27, 1860 in New York City, the day of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech

He employed Alexander Gardner, James Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William Pywell, George N. Barnard, Thomas C. Roche, and seventeen other men, each of whom was given a traveling darkroom, to go out and photograph scenes from the Civil War. Brady generally stayed in Washington, D.C., organizing his assistants and rarely visited battlefields personally. This may have been due, at least in part, to the fact that Brady's eyesight had begun to deteriorate in the 1850s.

In October 1862, Brady presented an exhibition of photographs from the Battle of Antietam in his New York gallery entitled, "The Dead of Antietam." Many of the images in this presentation were graphic photographs of corpses, a presentation totally new to America. This was the first time that many Americans saw the realities of war in photographs as distinct from previous "artists' impressions".

Following the conflict, a war-weary public lost interest in seeing photos of the war, and Brady’s popularity and practice declined drastically.

Later years and death

Brady, just before his death

During the war, Brady spent over $100,000 to create over 10,000 plates. He expected the U.S. government to buy the photographs when the war ended, but when the government refused to do so he was forced to sell his New York City studio and go into bankruptcy. Congress granted Brady $25,000 in 1875, but he remained deeply in debt. Depressed by his financial situation, loss of eyesight and devastated by the death of his wife in 1887, he became very lonely. Mathew Brady died penniless in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, at five o'clock, on January 15, 1896, from complications following a streetcar accident.

Brady's funeral was financed by veterans of the 7th New York Infantry. He was buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Levin Corbin Handy, Brady's nephew by marriage, took over his uncle's photography business after his death.

Legacy and people photographed

Grave of Mathew Brady

Brady photographed 18 of the 19 American Presidents from John Quincy Adams to William McKinley. The exception was the 9th President, William Henry Harrison, who died in office three years before Brady started his Photographic Collection.

The thousands of photographs Mathew Brady took have become the most important visual documentation of the Civil War, and have helped historians better understand the era.

Brady photographed and made portraits of many senior Union officers in the war, including Ulysses S. Grant, Nathaniel Banks, Don Carlos Buell, Ambrose Burnside, Benjamin Butler, Joshua Chamberlain, George Custer, David Farragut, John Gibbon, Winfield Hancock, Samuel P. Heintzelman, Joseph Hooker, Oliver Howard, David Hunter, John A. Logan, Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, James McPherson, George Meade, Montgomery C. Meigs, David Dixon Porter, William Rosecrans, John Schofield, William Sherman, Daniel Sickles, Henry Warner Slocum, George Stoneman, Edwin V. Sumner, George Thomas, Emory Upton, James Wadsworth, and Lew Wallace.

On the Confederate side, Brady photographed P. G. T. Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, Lord Lyons, James Henry Hammond, and Robert E. Lee. (Lee's first session with Brady was in 1845 as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, his final after the war in Richmond, Virginia.)

Brady also photographed Abraham Lincoln on many occasions. His Lincoln photographs have been used for the $5 dollar bill and the Lincoln penny.

Brady can also be considered a pioneer in the orchestration of a "corporate credit line." In this practice, every image produced in his gallery was labeled “Photo by Brady;” however, Brady dealt directly with only the most distinguished subjects and most portrait sessions were carried out by others.^[7]

Mid-19th century "Brady stand" photo model's armrest table

As perhaps the best-known US photographer in the 19th century, it was Brady's name that came to be attached to the era's heavy specialized end tables which were factory-made specifically for use by portrait photographers. Such a "Brady stand" of the mid-19th century typically had a weighty cast iron base for stability, plus an adjustable-height single-column pipe leg for dual use as either a portrait model's armrest or (when fully extended and fitted with a brace attachment rather than the usual tabletop) as a neckrest.^[8] The latter was often needed to keep models steady during the longer exposure times of early photography.^[9] While Brady stand is a convenient term for these trade-specific articles of studio equipment, there is no proven connection between Brady himself and the Brady stand's invention circa 1855.^[10]

Brady produced over seven thousand pictures (mostly two negatives of each). One set "after undergoing extraordinary vicissitudes," came into U.S. government possession. His own negatives passed in the 1870s to E. & H.T. Anthony, of New York, in default of payment for photographic supplies. They "were kicked about from pillar to post" for ten years, until John C. Taylor found them in an attic and bought them; from this they became "the backbone of the Ordway-Rand collection; and in 1895 Brady himself had no idea of what had become of them. Many were broken, lost, or destroyed by fire. After passing to various other owners, they were discovered and appreciated by Edward Bailey Eaton," who set in motion "events that led to their importance as the nucleus of a collection of Civil War photos published in 1912 as The Photographic History of the Civil War.^[11]

In popular culture

The Franco-Belgian comics series Les Tuniques Bleues ("The Blue Coats") is set during the Civil War, being largely humorous in tone. One episode, Des bleus en noir et blanc (French for Blues in Black and White), published in 1975, featured Brady going to the front line in order to take photos. He is depicted as being extremely calm under pressure, even in the midst of battle — at one stage even asking the combatants to stand still as he takes a photo, as if they were a family group. This attitude frustrates the soldiers charged with escorting him, especially when they get too close to the fighting. One of them gets so furious with Brady that he even physically assaults him with his camera. Although seriously injured as a result, Brady takes it all very calmly, defending the soldiers on the basis that his actions got them into a dangerous situation. When later the battle goes badly for them, Brady helps President Lincoln escape in his traveling darkroom.

Notes

1. ^ Horan, James D. (1988-12-12). Mathew Brady: Historian With a Camera. New York: Random House. ISBN 0517001047. 
2. ^ Zoe C. Smith, “Brady, Mathew B.,” American National Biography Online, (February 2000) <http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00096.html> (25 January 2009).
3. ^ Zoe C. Smith, “Brady, Mathew B.,” American National Biography Online, (February 2000) <http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00096.html> (25 January 2009).
4. ^ Volo, James M. (2004). The Antebellum Period. Greenwood Press. pp. 106. ISBN 0313325189. http://books.google.com/books?q=Matthew+Brady+broke+through+newspaper+industry+prohibitions+&btnG=Search+Books. 
5. ^ http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa/timeline.html
6. ^ Although Brady was photographed wearing a sword under his linen duster and claimed to have received the weapon at First Bull Run from the 11th New York Infantry—see Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War Vol 1 p. 31—there is doubt as to whether he took pictures at the battle. See Frassantito's Antietam (reference only).
7. ^ Zoe C. Smith, “Brady, Mathew B.,” American National Biography Online, (February 2000) <http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00096.html> (25 January 2009).
8. ^ Macy, et al, "Macy Photographic Studio's Dispatch, The", Northampton MA, Spring-Summer 1913, pg 2
9. ^ ibid., pg 3
10. ^ ibid., pg 2
11. ^ The Photographic History of the Civil War, in Ten Volumes, Francis Trevelyan Miller, editor-in-chief, and Robert S. Lanier, Managing Editor, The Review of Reviews Co., New York, 1912., p. 52

References

• Panzer, Mary (1997). Mathew Brady and the Image of History. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/1-58834-143-7, LCC TR140.B7 P36 1997|1-58834-143-7, LCC TR140.B7 P36 1997]]. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mathew Brady

• MathewBrady.com
• Mathew Brady biography at American Memory of the Library of Congress
  • Selected Civil War photographs by Brady and his contemporaries at American Memory
• Mathew Brady Photographs More than 6,000 photographs available in the Archival Research Catalogof the National Archives and Records Administration
• Mathew Brady's World - biography, timeline and analysis of Brady's work at the Smithsonian Institution
  • Mathew Brady's portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
• Mathew Brady biography with large photograph collection
• BRADY'S NATIONAL GALLERY OF DAGUERREOTYPES An 1850 advertisement from The Daguerreian Society web site
• PHOTOGRAPHY—BRADY'S DAGUERREAN SALOON A description of his gallery (1853) from The Daguerreian Society web site
• M. B. BRADY. PHRENOLOGICAL CHARACTER AND BIOGRAPHY An 1858 "phrenological profile" of Brady from The Daguerreian Society web site
• STILL TAKING PICTURES An 1891 reminiscence by Brady from The Daguerreian Society web site
• Mathew Brady at Find a Grave Retrieved on 2009-5-13
• RMP Archive historical archive of Mathew Brady images to view and buy restored prints

Persondata
NAME	Brady, Mathew B.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH	ca. 1823
PLACE OF BIRTH	Warren County, New York
DATE OF DEATH	1896-01-15
PLACE OF DEATH	Presbyterian Hospital, New York City, New York

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