# Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Portrait
> Mathew B. Brady - 1860-02-27
> Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/mathew-brady/brady-lincoln-cooper-union/
> Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-23
## Tombstone
- **Artist:** Mathew B. Brady
- **Date:** 1860-02-27
- **Medium:** Wet-plate (collodion) glass negative, printed as an albumen silver print; distributed as cartes de visite and later as cabinet-card and imperial-size prints. Surviving Library of Congress prints are albumen silver prints; the museum's digital surrogates are scans of those prints, not of the original negative.
- **Dimensions:** Carte de visite prints of this sitting follow the standard format, image approximately 5.7 x 8.9 cm (2 1/4 x 3 1/2 in) mounted on card stock approximately 6.4 x 10.2 cm (2 1/2 x 4 in). Later Brady's Gallery reprints and 'imperial' enlargements were issued in larger formats up to about 43 x 53 cm. The dimensions of the original glass plate negative are not stated in the sources consulted.
- **Object type:** Photograph
- **Period:** American, mid-nineteenth century
- **Current location:** Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, which holds multiple period prints of this sitting under separate catalog numbers.
- **Attribution:** accepted
## Summary
Mathew Brady photographed Abraham Lincoln at his temporary New York gallery on the morning of 27 February 1860, hours before Lincoln delivered the Cooper Union address that made him a serious presidential contender. Brady drew Lincoln's collar up to shorten the appearance of his long neck and his studio smoothed the lines of his face, producing the beardless image that Republican printers turned into campaign woodcuts, lithographs and cartes de visite through the 1860 election.Lincoln is widely quoted as later crediting Brady and the speech together with making him president. That line traces to a single source: an 1891 newspaper interview Brady gave in old age, thirty-one years after the fact, recalling his own introduction to the president through Ward Hill Lamon. No contemporary record of Lincoln saying it has been found, and historians who work with Brady's biography treat the interview itself as unreliable, valuable mainly because so little else about Brady survives in his own words.This is one of at least seven documented photographic sittings between Brady's studio and Lincoln between 1860 and 1864 (Ostendorf numbers including O-17, O-57, O-59, O-60 and O-84), and it is the earliest: a clean-shaven, pre-nomination Lincoln photographed as a candidate rather than as the bearded wartime president of the later Washington sittings, several of which were actually operated by Brady's studio employee Anthony Berger rather than Brady himself.
## Provenance
Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it.
- **1860-02-27** Mathew Brady's gallery, New York `[documented]` (creation)
Photographed at Brady's temporary gallery at 643 Broadway, New York, on the morning of 27 February 1860, the day of Lincoln's Cooper Union address. Identified in the standard Lincoln photograph literature as Ostendorf no. 17 and Meserve no. 20, Brady's first photograph of Lincoln.
- **1860-1873** Mathew Brady's studio and its negative stock `[documented]` (commercial distribution)
The negative was printed and sold commercially by Brady's gallery as cartes de visite during the 1860 campaign and after, and licensed or copied for use by engravers and lithographers producing campaign material. Brady's broader negative stock, including presumably this negative, remained nominally his through the Civil War years until the financial panic of 1873 forced him into bankruptcy and the sale of his New York gallery.
- **1873-1954** Dispersed: partly to Levin C. Handy (Brady's wife's nephew), partly to other later holders `[unknown]` (dispersal)
Following Brady's bankruptcy, his negative stock was not kept together as a single archive. Some material passed to Levin C. Handy, who had apprenticed under Brady and continued operating a photographic studio; his family's holdings, including glass negatives dating back to Brady found in deteriorating storage, were later sold. Whether the specific negative or negatives from this 1860 sitting were among Handy's holdings, as opposed to being lost, destroyed, or held elsewhere, is not established in the sources consulted.
- **1954-present** Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (prints); National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and other institutions (related Brady studio material) `[documented]` (institutional acquisition)
The Library of Congress purchased the Handy family's Brady-related negative holdings in 1954, forming the Brady-Handy collection. Separately, the collector Frederick Hill Meserve's holdings of Brady studio material, including reference prints and negatives used to compile his 1911 book on Lincoln photographs, passed to his daughter Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and were later acquired in large part by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and by Yale University. The Library of Congress today holds and catalogs multiple period prints of this specific 1860 sitting (LCCN 98504529 and LCCN 2009630664); no source consulted identifies a specific surviving original negative of this exact sitting as being held by a named institution.
## Open questions
- Where is the original glass-plate negative from the 27 February 1860 sitting now, or does it survive at all? The sources consulted describe surviving prints, not a located, identified negative.
- What was the original print run and retail price of the 1860 cartes de visite made from this negative?
- Did Lincoln in fact ever say anything resembling 'Brady and the Cooper Union made me President,' or is the line entirely Brady's own later invention or embellishment? The only source is Brady's single 1891 interview, given three decades after the event and treated cautiously by historians who work with his biography.
- Exactly how much of the facial smoothing seen in widely reproduced versions of this image originates in Brady's own negative retouching, as opposed to the further idealization introduced independently by the various engravers and lithographers who adapted it for campaign use in 1860?
- Who, if anyone other than Brady, was present at or assisted with this specific sitting? Several of Brady's later Lincoln sittings are documented as the work of studio employees such as Anthony Berger; no operator besides Brady himself is named for this sitting in the sources consulted, but Brady's practice of delegating camera work makes this worth confirming rather than assuming.
## Sources
- [1] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, catalog record for '[Abraham Lincoln, candidate for U.S. president, three-quarter length portrait, before delivering his Cooper Union address in New York City] / Brady, N.Y.' (LCCN 98504529, reproduction number LC-USZ62-13016 / cph.3a05636), citing Ostendorf no. 17, Meserve no. 20, and Frederick Hill Meserve, The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln (New York, privately printed, 1911), p. 51.
- [2] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, catalog record for 'Abraham Lincoln, candidate for U.S. president, before delivering his Cooper Union address, New York, N.Y., on Feb. 27, 1860' (LCCN 2009630664, digital ID cph.3a09102).
- [3] Cornell University Library, 'Dawn's Early Light' online exhibition, catalog entry for 'Abraham Lincoln, the Cooper Union Portrait,' describing the print as an albumen print on a carte de visite mount.
- [4] HistoryNet, 'The Photograph that Made Lincoln President,' on the sitting at 643 Broadway, Brady's difficulties posing Lincoln, Brady's remark 'I had great trouble in making a natural picture,' and Francis B. Carpenter's contemporary assessment of the photograph's political effect.
- [5] Wikipedia, 'List of photographs of Abraham Lincoln,' for the Ostendorf numbering of Brady's several Lincoln sittings (O-17, O-57, O-59, O-60, O-84, O-91, O-92) used here to distinguish this sitting from Brady's other photographs of Lincoln. Flagged as a tertiary source for cross-checking against the Ostendorf/Hamilton print reference and the Library of Congress catalog.
- [6] National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, online exhibition material on Brady's photographs of Lincoln, describing the collar adjustment made during the sitting and the studio retouching of facial lines and Lincoln's left eye on the negative.
- [7] Smithsonian Magazine, 'How One Mathew Brady Photograph May Have Helped Elect Abraham Lincoln,' summarizing Harold Holzer's argument in Lincoln at Cooper Union (2004) about the combined political effect of the speech and the photograph.
- [8] George Alfred Townsend, 'Still Taking Pictures: Brady, the Grand Old Man of American Photography,' interview with Mathew Brady, The World (New York), 12 April 1891, transcribed at Civil War Richmond, containing the sole located source for Brady's account of Lincoln's remark 'Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President,' recalled via Brady's introduction to Lincoln through Ward Hill Lamon.
- [9] HistoryNet, 'The Photograph that Made Lincoln President,' on the campaign-era reproduction of the photograph as wood engravings in Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and as lithographs by Currier and Ives, J.C. Buttre, and Ensign, Bridgman and Fanning, and on the later timing of mass carte de visite popularity in the United States.
- [10] Library of Congress, background note on the Brady-Handy photograph collection, on Levin C. Handy's apprenticeship under Brady, the 1954 Library of Congress purchase of the Handy family's negative holdings from his daughters, and the condition in which the glass negatives were found.
- [11] EBSCO Research Starters, 'Mathew B. Brady,' noting in its source assessment that the 12 April 1891 Townsend interview with Brady 'is exploited in many accounts of his life' because of 'the dearth of material directly relating to the man,' used here as the basis for treating the interview, and the Lincoln quotation recorded in it, with caution.
- [12] Emerging Civil War, 'A Spirit in My Feet Said Go, and I Went,' on Brady's own recorded words explaining his decision to organize a corps of photographers to cover the Civil War at his own financial risk.
- [13] American Battlefield Trust, biography of Mathew Brady, for his early training under William Page and Samuel F.B. Morse, his New York and Washington gallery openings, the 1873 bankruptcy, and his death in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in 1896.
- [14] The Henry Ford, museum catalog entry on a portrait of Abraham Lincoln taken 9 February 1864, for the identification of that sitting's photographer as Anthony Berger, a studio operator employed by Brady, distinct from Brady himself.
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