(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.

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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.

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

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.

c.1823–96, American pioneer photographer, b. Warren co., N.Y. Brady learned the daguerreotype process from S. F. B. Morse and in 1844 opened his own photographic studio in New York City, which brought him widespread fame. He published Gallery of Illustrious Americans in 1850 and five years later experimented successfully with the wet-plate process. He began photographing President Lincoln in 1860. When the Civil War began Brady was authorized to accompany and photograph the armies; through his efforts a vast visual record of the war was preserved. In 1875 the government purchased part of Brady's collection, but the rest passed into private hands after the photographer's financial failure. In 1954 the Library of Congress acquired the enormous Handy collection of Brady's work.

Bibliography

See R. Meredith, Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man (1946, repr. 1974); J. D. Horan, Mathew Brady, Historian with a Camera (1955); H. D. Milhollen and D. H. Mugridge, comp., Civil War Photographs (1961).

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