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MATHEW B. BRADY, of Irish descent, was taught
photography and launched in the United States by Samuel B. Morse, the inventor
of the telegraph. He was one of the leading pioneers in photography and was
celebrated or his portraits of famous men. f p
All the Presidents of the United States from 1845 to
1896 were photographed in his studios at New York and Washington. He was widely
known during the period of the daguerreotype, and was awarded first prize at the
1844 New York World's Fair and the Universal Exposition of London in 1851. In
spite of this, his daguerreotypes and collodion plates remained unknown until my
recent discovery of forty-five daguerreotypes and 3,000 plates. They represent
the only known collection of original negatives of this
At the London Exposition of 1851, Brady exhibited
forty-five daguerreotypes which attracted so much attention that Queen Victoria
made note of them, and when the Princes of Wales (Edzward VII) visited the
United States in 1860 he wrote down two important things to do-have his
photograph taken by Brady and go to Barnum's Circus.
Brady was Lincoln's favourite photographer. His New
York studio, called The Valhalla of Broadway, was the meeting place of
fashionable America from 1841 to 1860. After amassing a fortune, however, the
photographer spent all his money in making a pictorial cord of the Civil War
which was published in ten volumes. The enemy took the darkroom on wheels in
which he rambled over the battlefields for some new-fangled war machine.
His original plates of the Civil War are now the
property of the United ,States government, which bought them at aution after he
went bankrupt, and which later, by an Act of Congress, paid the photographer the
sum of $ 25,000.
Info Brady, Mathew B. 1823-1896 Start technique heliogravure