Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Portrait
1860-02-27 · Wet-plate
Library of Congress
Mathew B. Brady
American · 1822-1896
Mathew Brady photographed at his own studio on 22 July 1861, the day after he was separated from his equipment in the Union retreat from the First Battle of Bull Run, wearing a sword given to him for his protection by soldiers of a New York Fire Zouave regiment. The operator is not named in the sources consulted; the image is credited only to Brady's own studio, an irony the rest of this page tries to take seriously. Library of Congress digital ID ds.13129, via The Photographic History of the Civil War (1911).
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division| Full name | Mathew Benjamin Brady |
|---|---|
| Worked as | Photographer, Gallery proprietor, Publisher |
| Born | c. 1822 (day and even year disputed · Warren County, New York |
| Died | 15 January 1896 · New York City (Presbyterian Hospital charity ward) |
| Nationality | American |
| Movement | American Civil War documentary photography |
| In this archive | 1 artwork |
| Sources | 27 cited |
| Last verified |
About this page 1 artwork in the archive · Last verified · 27 sources cited
On this page 13 sections
ContentsClose
Brady's name sits on more Civil War photographs than any other American's, and a large share of them were not taken by his own hand. By the time the war began, his eyesight had failed badly enough that he rarely if ever operated a camera himself; he built and financed a field operation of roughly twenty employed photographers instead, and every plate that came back from the front, whoever exposed it, went out under a single printed line: Photographed by Brady. Two of his most gifted operators, Alexander Gardner and Timothy H. O'Sullivan, broke from his studio in 1862-63 at least partly over exactly that practice, and Gardner's own 1866 album named its photographers individually as a direct correction of it. Reading a photograph credited to Brady, from this distance, means reading past the credit line to ask who actually stood behind the camera - and often the sources cannot tell you.
He built the largest, most publicized photographic enterprise in the United States from nothing: a daguerreotype gallery on Broadway in 1844, then studios he named, without irony, National - a stated ambition to build a portrait gallery of American greatness that survives as a documented intention rather than a later metaphor. He personally financed a large share of the Civil War coverage that bears his name, spent more than he ever recovered, and expected the federal government to buy the result at a price that would have made him whole. It did not. Congress eventually paid a fraction of what the collection was said to be worth, his creditors took the rest, and he died in the charity ward of a New York hospital in 1896, buried at the expense of the veterans who remembered what his studio had shown them.
What he actually made, as against what his studio's imprint claims, is the subject of this page.
Records in this archive
Images
Chronology
- c. 1822
Born in Warren County, New York, to Irish immigrant parents Andrew and Julia Brady; exact date disputed across sources.111
- 1844
Opens the Daguerreian Miniature Gallery at Broadway and Fulton Street, New York.1
- 1845-1850
Produces The Gallery of Illustrious Americans with journalist Charles Edwards Lester and lithographer Francis D'Avignon; only twelve of twenty-four planned parts are issued before the project is abandoned as a financial failure.1
- 1849
Opens a Washington, D.C. studio.1
- 1850
Marries Juliet Handy in Washington, D.C.11
- 1858
Opens Brady's National Photographic Art Gallery at 350-352 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.; Alexander Gardner is made manager of the Washington gallery.418
- 1860
New York studio operating as Brady's National Portrait Gallery (a name carried until 1894); photographs the House of Representatives of the XXXVI Congress.21
- 1861
21-22 July: present at the First Battle of Bull Run; is separated from his equipment in the retreat and is photographed the following day at his own studio wearing a sword given to him by New York Fire Zouaves.19
- 1862
19 September, two days after Antietam: Gardner and James Gibson photograph the battlefield dead; the following month Brady's New York gallery exhibits the images as The Dead of Antietam, and the New York Times review of 20 October credits Brady alone.18
- 1862
Around November, Gardner leaves Brady's employ, reportedly over the studio's practice of crediting all staff work to Brady.418
- 1863
May, Gardner opens his own Washington gallery with his brother James, hiring several former Brady staff including Timothy H. O'Sullivan.418
- 1864
9 February: Brady's studio employee Anthony Berger, not Brady personally, photographs Lincoln at several poses at the Washington gallery, a sitting documented on this site's own Cooper Union portrait record.17
- 1865-1866
Gardner publishes Photographic Sketch Book of the War in two volumes, naming eleven individual photographers plate by plate, a direct correction of Brady's blanket-credit practice.18
- 1873
The Panic of 1873 forces the sale of Brady's New York studio and his bankruptcy, after a prior attempt to sell his collection to the New York Historical Society had already failed.111
- 1874
July: Secretary of War William Belknap purchases part of Brady's negative stock at public auction for $2,500, because Brady could no longer pay storage costs. A separate National Archives account (Prologue magazine) gives $2,840 for a larger group of roughly 6,000 negatives; whether this describes the same purchase, an overlapping one, or an error is not resolved in the sources consulted.587
- 1875
19 February: Belknap writes to Representative James Garfield about the negatives still held by the War Department. April: Congress, under authorization secured by Representative Benjamin Butler, appropriates $25,000 for the direct purchase from Brady of 3,735 glass plates, against a collection Butler valued at $150,000; Brady's creditors take the proceeds.57
- 1884
Juliet Brady dies.11
- 1894
Brady is seriously injured in a streetcar accident.11
- 1896
15 January: dies in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital, New York; his funeral is financed by veterans of the 7th New York Infantry; buried at Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C.311
- 1921
The Army Signal Corps takes custody of the War Department's Brady negatives to make copies available to the public.8
- 1940
The National Archives accessions the Brady collection held by the government since 1875.8
- 1943
The Library of Congress purchases the Civil War Glass Negatives collection, roughly 7,500 original and 2,500 copy negatives covering Brady, Gardner and other photographers combined, from the Phelps Publishing Company of Springfield, Massachusetts.18
- 1954
The Library of Congress purchases the Brady-Handy collection, roughly 10,000 negatives, from the family of Levin C. Handy.17
- 2011
April: Sotheby's, New York, sells Brady's 1849 whole-plate daguerreotype of John C. Calhoun for $338,500, a record for the artist, against a $30,000-$50,000 estimate.1213
- 2023
Rare-book dealer Stephan Loewentheil gives the Calhoun daguerreotype to the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.14
The market
The strongest documented Brady market result is not a print but a daguerreotype: his 1849 whole-plate portrait of Senator John C. Calhoun, the last photograph made of Calhoun before his death in 1850, sold at Sotheby's, New York, in April 2011 for $338,500 against a $30,000-$50,000 estimate, a recorded auction house against which two bidders, the dealer Stephan Loewentheil and the collector Michael Mattis, competed before Loewentheil prevailed; the source reporting the figure labels it a hammer price and does not separately confirm whether buyer's premium is included. Loewentheil gave the daguerreotype to the National Portrait Gallery in 2023, so the object that set Brady's auction record is no longer on the market at all.
Lower down the market, and closer to the imprint problem this page is built around, is a Brady-credited albumen photograph of Lincoln with his son Tad, made 9 February 1864 and signed in ink by Lincoln: one of only three known copies of this particular pose. RR Auction sold one copy on 18 February 2021 for $135,473 including buyer's premium against a $75,000-plus estimate; another copy is reported, within that same auction listing rather than independently verified here, to have sold for $325,000 in 2002 as part of the Forbes Collection. What neither figure discloses on its own is that the 9 February 1864 sitting is now documented as the work of Brady's employee Anthony Berger operating Brady's camera, not Brady himself - so a buyer paying six figures for 'a Brady' in this instance is, on the current attribution, paying for Berger's work under Brady's name.
| Date | Sale | Work | Result | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-04 | Sotheby's | John C. Calhoun, whole-plate daguerreotype, 1849 | Hammer not separately stated in the sources consulted With premium $338,500 total realized price (the cited source states this as the final price achieved and does not itself use the term hammer price; not independently confirmed against Sotheby's own price-realized data) USD | Estimate $30,000-$50,000; more than five times the high estimate; a recognized auction record for the artist. Bought by dealer Stephan Loewentheil over collector Michael Mattis; gifted to the National Portrait Gallery in 2023. |
| 18 February 2021 | RR Auction | Abraham Lincoln with son Tad, albumen photograph, 9 February 1864, signed 'A. Lincoln' | Hammer not separately stated With premium $135,473 (price realized, premium included per the auction house's own reporting) USD | Estimate $75,000-plus; one of three known copies of this pose. The camera was operated by Brady's employee Anthony Berger, not Brady personally. |
| 2002 | not identified in the source consulted | Abraham Lincoln with son Tad, albumen photograph, 9 February 1864 (a different copy of the same pose) | Hammer not stated With premium $325,000 (as reported) USD | Reported only within the 2021 RR Auction lot listing for a different copy, as part of the 'Forbes Collection'; not independently verified against a primary auction catalog in the sources consulted. |
Hammer is the price at which the bidding stopped; with premium adds the fee the house charges the buyer on top. Hammer price and buyer's premium in the glossary.
Where to see the work
| Institution | City | Holdings | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division | Washington, D.C. | Two separate Brady-related acquisitions: the Civil War Glass Negatives collection (purchased 1943, roughly 7,500 original and 2,500 copy negatives covering Brady, Gardner and others combined) and the Brady-Handy collection (purchased 1954 from Levin C. Handy's family, roughly 10,000 negatives, chiefly studio portraits of presidents, members of Congress, military and naval officers and Supreme Court justices). | |
| National Archives and Records Administration, Still Picture Branch | College Park, Maryland | The government-purchased plates from the 1874 auction and the 1875 Congressional purchase (3,735 plates), transferred to Army Signal Corps custody in 1921 and accessioned by the National Archives in 1940; at least 12,000 Civil War-era images credited to Brady and his associates together. | |
| National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution | Washington, D.C. | The 1849 Calhoun daguerreotype (gift of Stephan Loewentheil, 2023), the Sojourner Truth and Garrett Davis studio prints illustrated on this page, and material from the Frederick Hill Meserve / Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt collection. | |
| Smithsonian National Museum of American History | Washington, D.C. | A Mathew Brady and Brady Studio photographic history collection of approximately 366 items dating from 1851 to 1921. | |
| Metropolitan Museum of Art | New York | Studio portraiture including the salted paper print of Peter Force illustrated on this page. | |
| Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library | New Haven, Connecticut | A portion of the Meserve / Kunhardt Brady-era holdings. | |
| Massachusetts Historical Society | Boston, Massachusetts | Studio portraiture including the 1857 photograph of Gamaliel Bailey illustrated on this page. |
The essay
Chapter 1The eye that failed twice
Brady was born to Irish immigrant parents, Andrew and Julia Brady, in Warren County, New York, in a year the sources themselves cannot agree on.
Brady was born to Irish immigrant parents, Andrew and Julia Brady, in Warren County, New York, in a year the sources themselves cannot agree on. As a teenager he reportedly travelled to the Saratoga and Albany area seeking treatment for an eye inflammation, and it was there, according to the American Battlefield Trust's biographical account, that he probably met the portrait painter William Page. Page's own connections in New York, that same source states, likely led Brady to Samuel F. B. Morse, the artist and telegraph inventor then teaching at New York University, who had brought the daguerreotype process back from Paris after meeting Louis Daguerre himself and was among the first Americans to teach it.
The detail is worth holding onto for what it foreshadows rather than for its own sake: a career built entirely on an optical medium that most likely began with a trip to treat failing eyes, and that would end, decades later, with Brady's own eyesight ruined and his hand almost entirely absent from the cameras that made his name.
Chapter 2A gallery, then a National Gallery
Brady opened the Daguerreian Miniature Gallery at Broadway and Fulton Street in New York in 1844, and won top awards at the American Institute's annual fair that year and again in 1845, 1846, 1849...
Brady opened the Daguerreian Miniature Gallery at Broadway and Fulton Street in New York in 1844, and won top awards at the American Institute's annual fair that year and again in 1845, 1846, 1849 and 1857, photographing figures including Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper. In 1849 he opened a second studio in Washington, D.C., and the following year he married Juliet Handy there - a marriage that, decades later, would put a share of his negatives into the hands of her family rather than his own.
Between about 1845 and 1850 Brady, the journalist Charles Edwards Lester and the lithographer Francis D'Avignon produced The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portfolio explicitly titled as containing the portraits of the most eminent citizens of the American Republic since the death of Washington: a stated, documented ambition to build a national visual record of American greatness, not a meaning read into the project afterward. It was sold by subscription at one dollar a part or twenty dollars for the full run of twenty-four planned parts, and it failed. Only twelve parts were ever issued; Brady could not recoup the roughly one hundred dollars per lithographic stone he owed D'Avignon, and the project was abandoned. The ambition did not die with it. Brady's Washington studio, opened at 350-352 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1858, traded as the National Photographic Art Gallery, and his New York operation was rebranded Brady's National Portrait Gallery, a name it carried from 1860 until 1894. The word National on Brady's own shingle is the whole of the symbolic programme this record can document: an explicit, financially punishing, and entirely ordinary civic ambition to be the country's visual memory of its own eminent men, stated in his own advertising rather than argued for by a later critic.
Chapter 3Twenty operators and one signature
Brady's eyesight deteriorated through the 1850s.
Brady's eyesight deteriorated through the 1850s. By the time the Civil War began he employed, by the most consistent count in the sources consulted, more than a score of photographers in the field, among them Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, James Gardner, William Pywell, George N. Barnard and Thomas C. Roche. He financed and organized the operation, and the National Park Service's own account states plainly that his failing vision meant he mostly coordinated from Washington rather than exposing plates himself.
Every image his employees made, whoever stood behind the camera, was published under Brady's own name. The practice is documented, not disputed: Brady's catalog albums of war photographs carried no credit for individual staff, and a reader in 1862 had no way to know that a photograph marked Photographed by Brady had very possibly never been touched by Brady's own hands.
Chapter 4Into the field: Bull Run
Brady went to the field in person for the First Battle of Bull Run on 21 July 1861, one of a small number of occasions the sources document him actually present at the front rather than directing...
Brady went to the field in person for the First Battle of Bull Run on 21 July 1861, one of a small number of occasions the sources document him actually present at the front rather than directing operators from a gallery. The Union defeat and the chaotic retreat that followed scattered his party and separated him from his equipment. By the time he reached Washington and then New York, his own studio's account has him without his gear and wearing a sword given to him, for his protection, by men of a New York Fire Zouave regiment.
A photograph made in his own studio on 22 July 1861, the day after the battle, shows him in exactly that state: a linen duster, a straw hat, the borrowed sword buckled on beneath the coat. It is a photograph of the war correspondent as a subject of the war he had gone to record, and it is among the clearest surviving evidence that Brady himself, and not only his employees, went to a battlefield.
Chapter 5Antietam and the sign that named only him
On 19 September 1862, two days after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner and James Gibson photographed the battlefield dead before burial parties had finished their work, the first time an...
On 19 September 1862, two days after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner and James Gibson photographed the battlefield dead before burial parties had finished their work, the first time an American battlefield had been photographed this way. A selection went on display the following month at Brady's New York gallery under the sign The Dead of Antietam. The New York Times reviewed the exhibition on 20 October 1862 and credited Brady by name; it did not mention Gardner or Gibson, the two men who had actually exposed the negatives. This site's own record for Alexander Gardner documents the review and the exhibition in full; it is reused here rather than re-researched, since it bears directly on the same imprint practice.
The omission was not unusual for 1862. It is unusual only in hindsight, once the men actually holding the cameras are known.
Chapter 6The break: Gardner and O'Sullivan leave
Gardner left Brady's employ around November 1862, reportedly over the credit practice described above.
Gardner left Brady's employ around November 1862, reportedly over the credit practice described above. In May 1863 he opened his own Washington gallery with his brother James, hiring several former Brady staff including O'Sullivan. Gardner's two-volume Photographic Sketch Book of the War, published in 1865-66, named eleven individual photographers across its hundred plates, crediting negative-maker and print-maker separately for each - a direct and deliberate departure from Brady's practice, and the clearest documented evidence that at least one of Brady's own former employees regarded the blanket imprint as a problem worth correcting in print. O'Sullivan contributed the largest number of plates of any single photographer in Gardner's book.
Brady never adopted the correction himself. His studio's imprint practice continued through the rest of the war and into his postwar catalogues, and it is the reason a photograph credited to Brady today so often needs a second look before the credit can be trusted at face value.
Chapter 7What the war actually cost him
Brady spent more than one hundred thousand dollars of his own money organizing and financing Civil War photography, on the expectation that the federal government would purchase the results after the...
Brady spent more than one hundred thousand dollars of his own money organizing and financing Civil War photography, on the expectation that the federal government would purchase the results after the war at a price that would recover his investment. It did not, at least not at that scale. The Panic of 1873 forced him to sell his New York studio and declare bankruptcy; an attempt to sell his collection to the New York Historical Society had already failed.
What happened next is documented in two distinct, and only partly reconciled, stages. In July 1874, Secretary of War William Belknap purchased part of Brady's negative stock at public auction because Brady could no longer pay to store them; the sources consulted give the price as either $2,500 for roughly 2,250 plates or $2,840 for a larger group closer to 6,000 plates, a discrepancy this record has not been able to resolve and states as a gap rather than an average. On 19 February 1875 Belknap wrote to Representative James Garfield about the remaining collection still in the War Department's hands. In April 1875, under Congressional authorization secured by Representative Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, the War Department purchased 3,735 glass plates directly from Brady for $25,000 - a figure Butler himself considered modest against a collection he put at $150,000 in value. Brady's creditors took the money. He never recovered financially.
Chapter 8Where the plates went
Brady's negative stock did not survive as one archive.
Brady's negative stock did not survive as one archive. Before the 1874 and 1875 government purchases, Brady had already given a duplicate set of war negatives to the supply firm E. and H. T. Anthony and Company against an unpaid bill; that set, and a further group later acquired from the family of Levin C. Handy, Brady's nephew by marriage and a former assistant who continued operating a Washington studio after Brady's death, together became the Brady-Handy collection, purchased by the Library of Congress in 1954: roughly ten thousand negatives, chiefly portraits of presidents, members of Congress, military and naval officers and Supreme Court justices.
The government's own purchased plates followed a separate custodial line: transferred to the Army Signal Corps in 1921 for copying, accessioned by the National Archives in 1940, and held there since in the Still Picture Branch. A third, related but distinct body of material, the roughly 7,500 original and 2,500 copy negatives now called the Civil War Glass Negatives collection, covering Brady, Gardner and other photographers combined and impossible now to fully disentangle by hand, was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1943 from the Phelps Publishing Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, after passing through several earlier owners. A fourth line runs through the private collector Frederick Hill Meserve, who assembled Brady-era material across the early twentieth century; his holdings passed to his daughter, Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, and from her to the National Portrait Gallery and to Yale University's Beinecke Library. No single institution holds what could honestly be called the Brady archive, and the sources consulted do not offer a reconciled total across all four lines.
Chapter 9Death in the charity ward
Juliet Brady died in 1884. Brady himself was seriously injured in a streetcar accident in 1894, and complications from it contributed to his death on 15 January 1896, in the charity ward of...
Juliet Brady died in 1884. Brady himself was seriously injured in a streetcar accident in 1894, and complications from it contributed to his death on 15 January 1896, in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Veterans of the 7th New York Infantry financed his funeral. He is buried at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., beside his wife, in the city where he had built and lost the studios he had insisted on calling National.
Chapter 10What is still called his
No catalogue raisonne exists for Brady's output, and no authenticating board rules on it.
No catalogue raisonne exists for Brady's output, and no authenticating board rules on it. What decides an attribution instead is the printed imprint on a period mount, which names the publisher rather than necessarily the operator; institutional custody records; and, in a small number of well-researched cases, direct archival identification of the actual employee behind the camera, as with the 9 February 1864 Lincoln sittings now credited to the operator Anthony Berger rather than to Brady. The Smithsonian's own prints of Sojourner Truth and of Senator Garrett Davis, both illustrated on this page, are catalogued as Mathew Brady Studio rather than attributed to Brady personally, for the same reason.
That is the honest state of the record. Brady financed, organized and gave his name to one of the largest documentary photography operations the nineteenth century produced, went bankrupt doing it, and left behind an output so large and so uniformly signed that separating his own hand from his employees' is, for most individual images, no longer possible. The imprint problem is not a footnote to Brady's career. It is the most accurate thing that can be said about it.
What is documented
Birth date disputed
Wikipedia gives circa 18 May 1822; Library of Congress catalog language and several Wikimedia Commons file credits give 'approximately 1823'; some sources give 1824. This record follows the c. 1822-1896 convention already used on this site's Cooper Union portrait record for consistency, but the exact date is not settled.1121
Employed operators
Approximately twenty photographers worked in the field under Brady's name during the Civil War, including Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, James Gardner, William Pywell, George N. Barnard and Thomas C. Roche.11
The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, in numbers
Sold by subscription at $1 per part or $20 for the full planned run of twenty-four parts; Brady owed lithographer Francis D'Avignon roughly $100 per stone and could not recoup it. Only twelve parts were issued before the project was abandoned.1
Presidents photographed
Brady's studio is widely credited with having created, copied or collected photographs of every U.S. president who held office between 1825 and 1897, with the single exception of William Henry Harrison, whose term was too brief. This record treats the claim as widely repeated rather than independently verified against a primary presidential-by-presidential source list.11
Ambrotype advertising
An 1855 newspaper advertisement announced Brady's ambrotypes as 'a New Style of Picture on Glass, more durable and perfect than any known method of portraiture.'14
Two undocumented quotations, deliberately not used
Two lines commonly attributed to Brady, 'the camera is the eye of history' and 'a spirit in my feet said Go, and I went,' could not be traced in the sources consulted to any dated, citable primary publication, unlike the Calhoun quotation used elsewhere on this page. They are recorded here as unverified rather than repeated as fact.15
Technique
Early process
Daguerreotype, from 1844 through the 1850s: a direct positive image on a silvered copper plate, unique and not reproducible without re-photographing the plate itself. Brady's earliest firmly attributed surviving work, including the 1849 whole-plate daguerreotype of John C. Calhoun, is in this medium.1214
Wet-plate collodion
The standard commercial process from the mid-1850s: a glass plate coated with collodion, sensitized in silver nitrate, exposed while still wet, and developed immediately in pyrogallic acid before the coating dried. An exposure of about two to three seconds in good light was typical. The plate had to be coated, exposed and developed within roughly an hour, which is why field photographers needed a horse-drawn wagon fitted out as a portable darkroom.29
Formats sold
Brady's studios sold the same sitting across multiple formats and price points: whole-plate and smaller daguerreotypes and ambrotypes in the 1850s, then salted paper prints, albumen prints mounted as cartes de visite, larger cabinet cards, and 'Imperial'-size enlargements once the collodion process made paper printing from a glass negative practical.14
The imprint as evidence, not proof
Because Brady's studios published every image under his own name regardless of who exposed the plate, the printed credit on a period mount identifies the publisher, not necessarily the operator. Museums now routinely qualify an attribution as 'Mathew Brady Studio' rather than 'by Mathew Brady' where the actual operator is not otherwise documented, and in at least one well-researched case, the 9 February 1864 Lincoln sittings, a specific employee, Anthony Berger, is now named as the operator in Brady's place.161726
Thumbprints on the plate
Conservators handling surviving glass negatives at the National Archives have found that some plates carry the operator's own thumbprint in the corner where it was held while still wet - an incidental physical trace of an individual hand that the printed imprint on a period mount does not provide.9
The surviving work
- What is accepted
- No single accepted-works total exists for Brady in the way one exists for a painter with a signed body of work, because his output was never assembled as a single collection. The National Archives holds at least 12,000 Civil War-era images credited to Brady and his associates together. The War Department purchased 3,735 glass plates directly from Brady in April 1875, after a separate 1874 auction purchase reported at $2,500 (per the House of Representatives' own history site and the National Archives) or, per a separate National Archives account, $2,840 for a larger group of roughly 6,000 negatives, a discrepancy not resolved in the sources consulted. The Library of Congress separately holds roughly 7,500 original and 2,500 copy Civil War glass negatives purchased in 1943, covering Brady, Gardner and other photographers combined, and a further approximately 10,000 negatives purchased in 1954 as the Brady-Handy collection. These figures overlap in ways the sources consulted do not fully untangle, and none of them covers his pre-war daguerreotype-era output between 1844 and 1861, which is not separately quantified in the sources consulted.
- What is contested
- Individual attribution within any of these collections is disputed image by image rather than settled for the career as a whole. Brady's studios published every photograph made by any employee under his own name; Gardner and O'Sullivan left his employ in 1862-63 at least partly over that practice, and Gardner's own 1866 Sketch Book named eleven individual photographers as a direct correction of it. The 9 February 1864 Lincoln sittings are now credited to the operator Anthony Berger rather than to Brady personally. The Smithsonian's own prints of Sojourner Truth and of Senator Garrett Davis, both illustrated on this page, are catalogued as Mathew Brady Studio rather than attributed to Brady by name, for the same reason.
- Who rules on attribution
- No active authenticating board rules on Brady's output, and none has existed historically for commercial studio photography of this kind. Attribution rests on the printed imprint on a period mount, which identifies the publisher rather than necessarily the operator; institutional custody records; and, in a small number of well-researched cases, direct archival identification of the operator. For the Lincoln photographs specifically, Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf's Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose (1963) supplies the standard O-numbers used to identify individual sittings, including several credited to Brady's studio, though that catalogue covers every known photograph of Lincoln by any photographer rather than Brady's output specifically.
Calhoun's eye was startling, and almost hypnotised me.Brady, recalling his 1849 sitting with Senator John C. Calhoun, as reproduced in the National Portrait Gallery's own wall text for the 2025-26 exhibition From Shadow to Substance. One of the only first-person statements by Brady about his own working method that this record could trace to a citable, dated source, in contrast to the far more widely repeated but undocumented lines attributed to him elsewhere and deliberately not used on this page.
Questions about Mathew B. Brady
Who was Mathew B. Brady?
Photographer; Gallery proprietor; Publisher. c. 1822-1896.
When did Mathew B. Brady live?
Born c. 1822 (day and even year disputed; see facts below), Warren County, New York; died 15 January 1896, New York City (Presbyterian Hospital charity ward).
Where can you see work by Mathew B. Brady?
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (Washington, D.C.); National Archives and Records Administration, Still Picture Branch (College Park, Maryland); National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.); Smithsonian National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.); Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (New Haven, Connecticut).
What does the market for Mathew B. Brady look like?
The strongest documented Brady market result is not a print but a daguerreotype: his 1849 whole-plate portrait of Senator John C. Calhoun, the last photograph made of Calhoun before his death in 1850, sold at Sotheby's, New York, in April 2011 for $338,500 against a $30,000-$50,000 estimate, a recorded auction house against which two bidders, the dealer Stephan Loewentheil and the collector Michael Mattis, competed before Loewentheil prevailed; the source reporting the figure labels it a hammer price and does not separately confirm whether buyer's premium is included.
What is still unresolved about Mathew B. Brady?
Brady's exact birth date is unresolved: sources give 18 May 1822, 'approximately 1823' and 1824 without agreeing.
Open questions
- Brady's exact birth date is unresolved: sources give 18 May 1822, 'approximately 1823' and 1824 without agreeing.
- The 1874 War Department auction purchase is reported as $2,500 (the House of Representatives' own history site and the National Archives' 'Unwritten Record' blog agree on this figure, with no plate count given) or, per a separate National Archives account (Prologue magazine), $2,840 for a larger group of roughly 6,000 negatives. Whether these describe the same transaction, overlapping transactions, or genuinely different figures is not established in the sources consulted.
- One source (the National Park Service) gives the 1875 Congressional payment to Brady as $75,000, against $25,000 given independently and more specifically by the National Archives' own Prologue magazine (which names Representative Benjamin Butler and a $150,000 valuation) and by PBS. This record uses $25,000 as the better-corroborated figure and treats $75,000 as an unresolved outlier rather than splitting the difference.
- No reconciled total exists for how many images survive across the Library of Congress's two separate Brady-related collections, the National Archives holdings, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Meserve/Kunhardt material at Yale, several of which overlap or duplicate each other.
- For most individual photographs bearing Brady's studio imprint, which specific employee, if any other than Brady, actually operated the camera is not documented and can no longer be recovered.
- Whether an original glass plate or daguerreotype survives, distinct from surviving prints, for the Perry, Force, Bailey, Slidell, Truth, Davis and House of Representatives sittings illustrated on this page is not established in the sources consulted.
- The two most commonly repeated Brady quotations, 'the camera is the eye of history' and 'a spirit in my feet said Go, and I went,' could not be traced to a dated primary source and are not used as fact on this page.
Related reading
Sources
- 1American Battlefield Trust, 'Mathew Brady' (biography). battlefields.org/learn/...
- 2American Battlefield Trust, 'Photography and the Civil War'. battlefields.org/learn/...
- 3Congressional Cemetery, 'Mathew Brady: The Father of Photojournalism' (blog). congressionalcemetery.org/blog/...
- 4Boundary Stones (WETA), 'A Tale of Two Photographers: Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner'. boundarystones.weta.org/2020/...
- 5U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, 'Mathew Brady Photographic Negatives'. history.house.gov/Records-and-Research/...
- 6PBS, American Experience, 'Lincoln's War Photographers'. pbs.org/wgbh/...
- 7National Archives, Prologue Magazine (Winter 1997), 'With the Compliments of...'. archives.gov/publications/...
- 8National Archives, Unwritten Record blog, 'Brady's Lens: The Civil War and the Mathew Brady Collection in the National Archives'. unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2017/...
- 9National Archives, Unwritten Record blog, '19th Century Photographic Processes and Formats'. unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2020/...
- 10National Park Service, 'Mathew Brady' (people page). nps.gov/people/...
- 11Wikipedia, 'Mathew Brady'. Roy Meredith, Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man) where possible. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- 12Sotheby's, lot description, '(#41) Mathew B. Brady', Photographs sale N08730, New York, April 2011. sothebys.com/en/...
- 13iPhotoCentral, 'Strong NY Auctions Herald Market Rebound: Sotheby's Lead-Off Spring Auction Totals Over $5.6 Million But With Only 18.5% Buy-in Rate'. iphotocentral.com/news/...
- 14artblart.com, exhibition post reproducing National Portrait Gallery wall text, 'From Shadow to Substance: Grand-Scale Portraits During Photography's Formative Years'. artblart.com/2026/...
- 15Emerging Civil War, 'A Spirit in My Feet Said Go, and I Went'. emergingcivilwar.com/2024/...
- 16RR Auction, lot detail, 'Abraham Lincoln' (Lincoln and Tad, 9 February 1864, signed), Presidents auction #603, 18 February 2021. rrauction.com/auctions/...
- 17Iconotheca record, 'Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Portrait' (slug: brady-lincoln-cooper-union). This site's own fuller treatment of the 27 February 1860 sitting, the Anthony Berger-operated 1864 sittings, and the negative custody chain summarized here; consult it directly for the object-level detail. iconotheca.com/artworks/...
- 18Iconotheca artist page, 'Alexander Gardner' (slug: alexander-gardner). This site's own researched account of the Gardner/O'Sullivan break and the Antietam exhibition, drawn on here rather than re-researched from scratch. iconotheca.com/artists/...
- 19Wikimedia Commons, File:MathewBrady1861.jpg (file description page; sourced to Library of Congress digital ID ds.13129 via The Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes, vol. 1, 1911). commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
- 20Wikimedia Commons, File:Matthew Calbraith Perry by Mathew B. Brady, c. 1856, salted paper print, from the National Portrait Gallery - NPG-9101248C 1.jpg. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
- 21Wikimedia Commons, File:House of Representatives, XXXVI Congress, U.S., 1860 - M. B. Brady. LCCN2006685417.jpg. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
- 22Wikimedia Commons, File:Peter Force by Mathew Brady c1858.jpg. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
- 23Wikimedia Commons, File:Gamaliel Bailey by Brady, 1857.jpg. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
- 24Wikimedia Commons, File:John Slidell by Brady restored.jpg. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
- 25Wikimedia Commons, File:Sojourner Truth.tif (credited to National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, object NPG.2002.90). commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
- 26Wikimedia Commons, File:Garrett Davis by Matthew Brady Studio.jpg (credited to National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, object NPG.81.M643.1). commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
- 27Wikimedia Commons, Category:Mathew Brady and Category:Portraits of Mathew Brady (category listings, used to identify candidate plates and portraits). commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...
Cite this pageIconotheca, “Mathew B. Brady”, The Provenance Record, iconotheca.com/artists/mathew-brady/, version of .
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