Mathew B. Brady

Photographer

• Born: c. 1823
• Birthplace: Warren County, near Lake George, New York
• Died: January 15, 1896
• Place of death: New York, New York

American photographer

The most famous American photographer of the nineteenth century, Brady brought to the public eye a panorama of personalities and scenes through the photographic medium and was especially instrumental in creating a poignant pictorial record of the Civil War.

Area of achievement Photography

Early Life

Little is known about Mathew B. Brady’s birth beyond the fact that he said he was born around 1823 in Warren County, New York. Little is known about his parents, though his father was probably an Irish immigrant. The death certificate for Brady, which was completed in 1896, lists his father’s name as Andrew and his mother’s name as Julia. Brady’s wife had preceded him in death, and he was therefore listed as a widower, with no name given for his spouse. This contributes to a problem surrounding Brady, because his wife, Juliet Elizabeth Handy, was apparently called “Julia,” too. The literature about Brady does not deal with this matter of his parents’ names, perhaps because there are so many unknowns about the man.

Even the odd spelling of Brady’s first name, with a single “t,” has no explanation, and as for the middle initial, Brady said it meant nothing. What is known of him comes from the sparest materials. There are no letters, notebooks, diaries, or other written matter. Despite his large enterprise, there are no wills, real estate transactions with his personal signature, or anything that is written by him. He was probably illiterate, though it has been suggested that he could read if not write. However, this is improbable, as there is no evidence to support the claim; indeed, some historians even doubt that the signatures on his photographs are by his hand.

There is no record or account of Brady’s education. Considering that all of his life seemed to be spent promoting himself in society and cultivating the prominent and the wealthy, he may have chosen to be mysterious about his humble background. His basic education was practical, beginning when he spent time in Saratoga, New York, where he met a painter named William Page. Saratoga, located just south of Lake George, has a long history as a popular resort and vacation area for prominent Americans. Because of its natural hot springs and attractive setting, as well as its location close to Albany and New York City, it was already an important health spa when Brady arrived.

Page became Brady’s first mentor, encouraging the young man from the lake country to sketch and draw. The lifestyles of the wealthy on their summer vacations and perhaps the work ethic of the artist Page, who, like most artists, placed himself in close proximity to potential clients, must have affected Brady. He moved with Page to New York City, where he did odd jobs and came in contact with Samuel F. B. Morse, a professor at the University of New York, which later became New York University. Morse, who later became famous for the invention of the telegraph, was experimenting with the daguerreotype reproduction process. He and a colleague, John William Draper, taught some young men the process; Brady was among them. Brady also learned the rudiments of photography from Morse and Draper.

As early as 1843, Brady was listed in the New York Doggett’s directory as a manufacturer of jewelry cases specializing in making miniature boxes with embossed tops. He also made cases for surgical instruments and storage and presentation boxes for daguerreotypes. It was shortly thereafter that Brady combined case-making with the production of daguerreotypes, setting up a gallery in a building just off Fulton Street and Broadway, directly across from P. T. Barnum’s popular American Museum and a block from the famed Astor House. This location was in the center of potential commercial traffic and in close proximity to the people of power who frequented the Astor House. Brady was quite successful, charging between three and five dollars for a sitting, with posing hours from ten o’clock to three o’clock. During those early years, he maintained his association with Page, Draper, Morse, and other men who were experimenting with new technology.

Brady had adopted the costume and style of his artistic and academic associates. A quick, nervous man of five feet, seven inches in height, he allowed his hair to grow long and frame his face. He later grew a mustache and goatee and took a fancy to bright scarves and a flat-topped, broad-brimmed hat. Sometimes he wore a cape and a cavalier-type hat graced with a feather. By 1855, his eyes were failing him, and he wore increasingly thick-lensed wire-framed glasses. In the prime of life, he was virtually blind.

The United States of the 1840’s rewarded technology and industry more than anything else, and Brady quickly prospered, expanded his operations, gave up his case-making business, and increasingly concentrated on a grand project: to photograph and publish pictures of every distinguished American. The newly formed American Institute of Photography held contests, and Brady won medals each year from 1844 to 1850. “Brady of Broadway” was what he was called, and in 1849 he received the first gold medal awarded for a picture taken using the daguerreotype process. He worked with reproductions on porcelain and ivory, with tinting and various exposures and light diffusion. Competition in the business was intense, all shops offering something unique to gain customers’ attention.

Brady pursued the great and the wealthy to complete his grand plan. It was not unusual for him to pick up the work of others and simply attach his name to it. He began to take on and quickly train a number of “operators” to take the pictures, as he could no longer focus the camera himself. He also branched out, establishing an office in Washington, D.C. There the Anthonys, Edward and Henry, had already set up a gallery and were attracting public officials and foreign dignitaries as subjects. They also set up a prosperous photography supply business on Broadway, which became the foundation for the Ansco company. Many of their pictures were sent to be put on display in their Broadway studio. It is believed that Brady, when frustrated in attempts to attract subjects for his great project, simply purchased the photographs he wanted from men such as the Anthonys.

Life’s Work

Brady’s ambitious project was designed to meet the growing competition from studios that stood side by side along Broadway. Camera operators rushed to open their own shops once they learned the rudiments of the craft. Physically unable to operate the equipment alone, Brady sought the grand idea that would sustain him. His master volume, Gallery of Illustrious Americans (1850), was a critical success but a financial failure at thirty dollars a copy. Undaunted, Brady hoped to bring out another volume and purchased the lithographic stones at one hundred dollars each. The project had caused him to neglect the paying part of his business. Brady also contributed to his own losses by mimicking the lifestyle of the rich in his choice of colognes, brandy, clothes, hats and scarves, and restaurants. Many of his prestigious clients he photographed free, ignoring the ordinary public that had sustained him. At twenty-eight, he was already well known, but still not financially secure.

During this period, Brady married Juliet Elizabeth Handy, a woman from Maryland whom he seems to have met when he was in Washington soliciting sittings. Though there is considerable speculation about her family’s status and wealth as well as her ostensible beauty, there is no support for the former, and Brady’s pictures of his wife do not flatter her. The date of the wedding is not known, but it had to be prior to his planning for a trip to London in 1851. Brady’s new idea was to enter a collection of forty-eight pictures in the London exposition that was being sponsored by Prince Albert. He won a prize for his entry, traveled through parts of Europe, again attaching himself to influential people, and supposedly took their pictures and purchased others for sale in his New York studio.

Returning home, Brady immediately embarked on the revitalization of his business. He won a prize in the New York World’s Fair competition in 1853, but he was never accepted into the community of craftspeople who were moving ahead in technology. He planned a bold move at this time—establishing a permanent Washington studio and hiring Alexander Gardner to manage it. Located on Pennsylvania Avenue between Sixth and Seventh streets, his studio was ideally situated to attract important people. Brady had also moved his New York studio farther uptown, to 359 Broadway. He experimented with skylights to bring greater illumination to his work, as well as blue glass. The future really lay with the collodion wet plate method of photography, but Brady was still infatuated with the primitive daguerreotype. Photography had come of age and Brady rushed to catch up, but the technical skills that would make him famous in history belonged to others.

Stock companies to promote various new techniques and products—Crystalotype, Ambrotype, Melaintype, and tintype—were formed with the most creative inventors as principals. Brady was not among them. A development of which Brady took advantage to his profit, however, was the creation of life-size portraits that, when touched up and tinted with colors, rivaled oil paintings and commanded a high price. They consumed great amounts of time for exposure, however, and tied up studio facilities that were needed for other works.

In 1857, the new rage, cartes de visite, captivated the nation and the world. The small portrait-bearing calling cards, printed on thin cardboard, were cheaply produced and very profitable. Brady and others saw the demand increase as immigrants wanted pictures to send abroad, easterners wanted pictures for relatives moving to the West, and the newly married wanted pictures for family and friends. The collecting of cards was another demand that had to be satisfied, and Brady leaped into the competition, offering fees to actors, statesmen, outlaws, and others to sit for the cards, which were then peddled throughout the country. Despite a lull in sales after a few years, the Civil War revived the market for the cards as servicemen rushed to the studios.

Brady was never close to those who were on the cutting edge of photographic innovation. He was more a promoter than an operator-photographer, and the fact that he was known to appropriate the work of others and attach his own name to it did not sit well with his competitors. He picked competitive shows very selectively, such as the 1854 New York Crystal Palace show, in which he drew top honors for his daguerreotypes. Brady was concentrating on his new gallery and studio, the most ornate in New York.

In Washington, Brady placed Alexander Gardner in charge. Gardner was exactly what he needed, as the man had mastered the Archer wet-glass process in England before coming to the United States in 1856. Gardner later was to break from Brady and go on to film the history of the American West, but his experience as Brady’s photographer of the Civil War projected them both to early prominence. Business was booming, and Brady again moved his New York studio further uptown in 1860, a location where his name became indelibly linked with that of Abraham Lincoln, who had come to give his celebrated Cooper Institute address.

The election of Lincoln and the advent of the Civil War encouraged all serious photographers to plan the filming of the dramatic times. Brady’s early mentor, John W. Draper, formed a committee to approach the secretary of war with a project to photograph events. They were put off, however, and it was now Brady who seized the initiative. Lincoln again sat for a formal picture, this time with beard (he had previously been photographed clean-shaven), and Brady’s Washington contingent also took pictures of both the inauguration and the Tyler Peace Commission. Two more photographers were sent to Washington to join Gardner as Brady gained presidential clearance to underwrite privately the photographing of the impending crisis.

More than three hundred photographers were involved in covering the Union during the Civil War, many in the direct employ of the War Department, who were not commercial people such as Brady’s men. Countless others, most unknown, filmed Confederate exploits as well. Few, however, had the elaborate laboratories on wheels that Brady put in the field. His black wagons, called “what’s its” by the troops, were at Bull Run to catch the first disaster of the long war.

After that debacle, Brady had seen enough of the war to realize that New York was the place for him. Keeping eighteen people in the field demanded money, and the studio in New York had to cover expenses that included his own high-toned lifestyle. The burdens of salaries, rent, transport, chemicals, and the like soon overwhelmed him, precipitating his collapse. His practice of filming dignitaries at no charge eroded his resources, and after Appomattox he drifted into virtual seclusion. He closed down his field operations and missed such events as the huge fire at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, in the same neighborhood as his studio. It was Gardner who persevered in capturing dramatic events in Washington.

Brady soon found that the market was saturated with war pictures. He stored thousands of plates and turned others over to satisfy debts that caused him to go bankrupt in 1873. The United States was exhausted by war and the bloody-shirt politics that followed it. The new excitement lay in the promise of the West, but Brady stayed home while a new army of photographers followed the sun. He sought to interest the government in his collections, to no avail. Ironically, the government was a successful bidder for thousands of wartime plates when he could not pay a storage bill of $2,840. Brady got nothing, and many pictures were destroyed in moving. A petition on his behalf was drawn up by General Benjamin Butler and James A. Garfield in 1875 to reward Brady with $25,000 for full title to his collection. The money was appropriated too late; the collection passed to the Anthony supply firm in lieu of payment on his debts. Although Brady had fallen on hard times, he won a bronze medal for his entry in a competition of photographs at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Still, he desperately needed money.

Sporadic interest continued during the 1880’s, as aging veterans’ groups made inquiries about Brady’s pictures. The government called in Albert Bierstadt, the famous painter and photographer, to make an assessment of their holdings. The pieces held by the Anthony firm changed hands several times until some seven thousand glass negatives were recovered and turned over to the government by John C. Taylor of Connecticut. The prohibitive cost of making prints meant that the negatives would remain in storage. Brady nevertheless persevered in the Washington gallery at 627 Pennsylvania Avenue, working with his wife’s nephew, Levin Handy. His wife, Juliet, had died of a heart condition on May 20, 1887, leaving him childless. In 1891, a newspaperman was startled to find Brady alive, wiry, and vigorous, with white hair and white mustache and goatee and wearing blue-tinted spectacles. In a revealing comment at that time, Brady suggested that he might have better spent his time becoming a craftsperson instead of seeking out personalities to photograph.

Brady continued to struggle to keep his studio going. On April 16, 1895, however, he was struck by a carriage and suffered a broken leg. This came when he was planning a new exhibition of his personal war slides: 128 pieces to be shown in New York on January 30, 1896. Still ailing, Brady went to the city alone to confirm details with officials of the Seventh Regiment organization. He stayed in a rooming house on East Tenth Street but soon took ill with a kidney ailment. A friend took him to New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital, where he died in the indigent ward on January 15, 1896. His remains were shipped to Washington, where he was buried, most probably at Congressional Cemetery.

Significance

Mathew Brady was a man possessed of vision and a passion for greatness. He was an indefatigable worker and promoter, as well as a believer in the dream of success. He believed in himself and committed his resources to photographing history. The horror and carnage of the war recorded by Brady’s men will forever haunt American history. Brady was not a historian with a camera; he was the entrepreneur who put cameramen in the field to make as much of a record as they could. His pictures do not interpret events as history does; rather, they present scenes, many of which would be indescribable in words.

As with many great figures in history, there is much that was not admirable in Brady. He might have been more humble and less self-serving. He might have done a better job keeping up with new technology. He might have been less enamored of great men and women and more conscious of that large constituency that he ignored to the detriment of history. He might have been kinder to those who did the photography, which is the only durable vestige of his glory. He might have been a better businessperson. Nevertheless, Brady’s initiative in the use of the craft of photography has provided an irreplaceable record of critical times in the history of the United States.

Bibliography

Hood, Robert E. Twelve at War: Great Photographers Under Fire. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967. This volume has a short essay that establishes Brady as the first of the leading war photographers.

Horan, James D. Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera. New York: Crown, 1955. This is a confounding but necessary book, which must be read very carefully as the author plays loose with dates and historical evidence and often passes off conjecture as reality. With regard to Brady, it is adulatory to a fault.

Kunhardt, Dorothy Meserve, and Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr. Mathew Brady and His World. New York: Time-Life Books, 1977. This work grew from the collections of Frederick Meserve and, though published as a picture book for popular consumption, is clear, well developed, and more historically correct than most works on Brady. The book also provides what has been a universal weakness in books dealing with Brady: a critique of the photographs and real effort into determining who actually took the picture.

Kunhardt, Philip B., Jr. “Mathew Brady,” Parts 1, 2. Smithsonian 8 (July, August, 1977): 24-35, 58-67. Some of this material can be found in the book by Dorothy and Philip Kunhardt, which developed from the research done for these articles.

Meredith, Roy. Mathew Brady’s Portrait of an Era. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946. These are large-format picture books much like that of James Horan, though they weave a narrative around the illustrations. Mathew Brady’s Portrait of an Era has considerable information concerning the activities of Brady at various times in his career, although much of the book seems to cry out for reexamination, especially because the object of the work is to tell a good story.

Panzer, Mary. Mathew Brady. London: Phaidon Press, 2001. One in a series of brief biographies of photographers published by Phaidon. This biography of Brady is written by the curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Sullivan, George. In the Wake of Battle: The Civil War Images of Mathew Brady. New York: Prestel, 2004. Contains more than 350 photographs of the war taken by Brady and his cameramen. The photos are arranged by battle site and event, with introductory essays about the battles, and archival information about the images and photographers.

Townsend, G. A. “Still Taking Pictures.” World (New York). April 12, 1891: 23. This is a newspaper reporter’s interview with the elderly Brady that, because of the dearth of material directly relating to the man, is exploited in many accounts of his life.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Nineteenth Century

January, 1839: Invention of Daguerreotype Photography Is Announced; 1878: Muybridge Photographs a Galloping Horse; January 14, 1900.