Mathew Brady's Portrait Gallery
About this resource
- Appropriate grades
- 4–12
- Subjects
- arts (photography), social studies (United States history)
- Provider
- Smithsonian Institution
Legal
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Though he is best know for his photographs of Abraham Lincoln, Brady Brady's images from this time period include portraits of Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant; J. H. Rainey, the first African-American Congressman; Red Cloud and his warriors. These images depict a volatile time in our nation's history that would have impact for generations. This Web site contains information about photographic processes and techniques of Brady's time. An extensive biography of Brady is also available, as is a searchable, comprehensive list of all those who sat for portraits. The list includes such notables as Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, Clara Barton, Daniel Webster, Matthew Perry, Horace Greeley, Jenny Lind, and President Zachary Taylor, just to name a few.
Born in 1823, Mathew Brady acquired a reputation early in life as one of America's greatest photographers — producer of portraits of the famous. In 1856, he opened a studio in Washington, D.C., the better to photograph the nation's leaders and foreign dignitaries. As he himself said, "From the first, I regarded myself as under obligation to my country to preserve the faces of its historic men and mothers." He became one of the first photographers to use photography to chronicle national history.
At the peak of his success as a portrait photographer, Brady turned his attention to the Civil War. Planning to document the war on a grand scale, he organized a corps of photographers to follow the troops in the field. Mathew Brady did not actually shoot many of the Civil War photographs attributed to him. More of a project manager, he spent most of his time supervising his corps of traveling photographers, preserving their negatives and buying others from private photographers freshly returned from the battlefield, so that his collection would be as comprehensive as possible. When photographs from his collection were published, whether printed by Brady or adapted as engravings in publications, they were credited "Photograph by Brady", although they were actually the work of many people.
Brady was not, however, a money manager and he fell into bankruptcy. His negatives were neglected until 1875, when Congress purchased the entire archive of more than 8,000 negatives for $25,000. Mathew Brady had a great and lasting effect on the art of photography. His war scenes demonstrated that photographs could be more than posed portraits, and his efforts represent the first instance of the comprehensive photo-documentation of a war.
