An admirer of Brady's work, General Ulysses S. Grant was photographed by Brady and his operators on several occassions. Here he is shown in an informal pose at City Point in Virginia in 1864. After the war, Grant supported efforts to have Brady's photographic archive preserved.

 

Mathew Brady's Portraits

Images as History at the Fogg Art Museum

By Stephen May

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- "The camera is the eye of history," Mathew Brady once said. "You must never take a bad picture."

The famed pioneering photographer may not have been able to live up to that credo completely, but he certainly bequeathed to posterity a multitude of images that will forever fix our ideas about the people and events of the last century. While he is best known today for his documentation of the Civil War, Brady early on established an international reputation as photographer of the famous men and women of his day.

Starting from humble beginnings and largely self-taught, this ambitious, energetic and talented Irish-American launched his career when photography was in its infancy. Before long he knew what he wanted: to record for all time portraits of the most important mid-Nineteenth Century Americans and foreign visitors to this country.

The admirable extent to which he succeeded is clear from the first modern-day exhibition devoted to the full range of Brady's oeuvre. On view are the likenesses by means of which we have visual knowledge of Lincoln, Grant, Lee and a host of their illustrious contemporaries.

"Mathew Brady: Images as History, Photography as Art," opened at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and will be on view at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University through April 15. Its last appearance will be at the International Center of Photography in New York City from May 1 to July 19.

Organized by Mary Panzer, the National Portrait Gallery's curator of photographs, the exhibition utilizes more than 130 early daguerreotypes, majestic Imperial photographs, tiny cartes de visite, cameras, posing stands and Brady's original client register to recreate the atmosphere of his New York and Washington studios, 1840s to 1860s, and to showcase his achievements.

The display and accompanying book emphasize Brady's role as impresario, entrepreneur, marketer and artist-historian bent on creating a visual, historical record. During the mid-Nineteenth Century, Brady was a "model of the rising businessman," says Panzer. At the time, she notes, "it was more prestigious that he didn't actually do the manual work."

"We can't say who made the exposures," Panzer observes, suggesting that many of the pictures on view were actually taken by operators working under Brady's supervision. But his role was crucial. He conceived the idea for pictures, "trained the photographers, set up the poses and said when to click the shutter," says the curator.

There was a "Brady look" about his images. The fact that a photograph came from Brady's studio was regarded as insuring its quality and veracity. But for all his remarkable work, Brady himself was a highly elusive person. As Panzer acknowledges, "We know little about Mathew Brady's early life."

He was born in Warren County, N.Y., around 1823. Afflicted with feeble eyesight from childhood, he left almost no written record - no journal and very little correspondence.

Painter William Page apparently got young Brady interested in art and encouraged him to move to New York City, where he worked at a variety of jobs while learning about photography, which had made its debut in France in 1839. In 1844, Brady opened his own studio on Broadway. He was so successful that within five years he photographed President James K. Polk in the White House.

Establishing the pattern he followed throughout his career, Brady took on the more elevated task of attracting sitters and presiding over the picture-taking process. Employees processed the plates and mounted the images. Brady's critical role was to organize the sitter's pose, compose the setting, arrange the lighting and select the lenses - all in an effort to ensure the most flattering yet realistic likeness possible.

Early on, Brady recognized that photography offered an ideal means to create a visual history, first of leaders of the day and eventually of sites where great events took place. Setting out to photograph as many eminent Americans as he could, by 1850 he had created portraits of such celebrities as James Fenimore Cooper, Dolley Madison and Martin Van Buren. Thousands flocked to Brady's gallery to gaze for the first time at likenesses of the great men and women of the era.

In 1849 he opened a second studio/gallery in Washington, initially to make daguerreotype portraits of dignitaries attending the inauguration of President Zachary Taylor. Before the venture failed and he returned to New York, Brady made likenesses of Taylor, many members of the House and Senate, and the justices of the Supreme Court. "He made portraits of the era's best-loved politicians, like [Daniel] Webster and [Henry] Clay, and used their reputations to enhance his own," Panzer writes in her book.

Constantly developing his skills to keep ahead of the competition, Brady mastered the glass-plate collodion process, which allowed the reproduction of images on paper prints. This process also provided photographers with the ability to enlarge photographic images, which came to be called "Imperials." Meanwhile, Brady gained international recognition, winning a medal for daguerreotypes at the International Exhibition at London's Crystal Palace in 1851.

Brady prospered in the 1850s, operating out of increasingly fancy quarters on Broadway, with galleries lined with portraits of prominent Americans from all walks of life. He "lives a pretty fast life and spends his money freely," one financial firm reported. Regarded as honest in his business dealings, Brady's free-spending habits and lack of business acumen kept him in financial hot water throughout his life.

Returning to Washington in 1858, business at Brady's National Photographic Art Gallery a dozen blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House flourished under the able management of Scottish-born photographer Alexander Gardner. Gardner went on to take some of the most graphic photographs of the Civil War.

Around this time, Brady's studio began producing cartes de visite, a variation on traditional calling cards. He turned out an enormous number of them, the handsome profits from which helped finance his forthcoming coverage of the Civil War. Brady's 1860 carte de visite of Abraham Lincoln helped the obscure Midwestern lawyer become President.

To Brady, the Civil War was both an entrepreneurial opening and patriotic cause. He "approached the outbreak of the war with the same energetic eye for opportunity that characterized every other step in his career," writes Panzer.

At the outbreak of hostilities, Brady obtained permission for teams of his photographers to join the Union Army in the field and record the action. In so doing, he was undoubtedly inspired by British photographer Roger Fenton's pioneering documentation of the Crimean War of 1855.

Brady himself spent relatively little time on battlefields, but he was the field general who organized the teams of operators and counseled them on what to photograph. When he did venture to camps and battle sites, he was invariably dressed in a broadcloth suit, linen duster and broad-brimmed hat.

Brady's men often traveled by horse-drawn picture wagons, hauling bulky equipment and producing images whose long exposure time limited them to static moments, rather than battlefield action. Nevertheless, the outdoor settings introduced a freshness that distinguished them from studio photography.

On occasion, photographs were composed with several generals and their staffs in the field or, in the case of General William T. Sherman and his generals, in a studio setting. Other scenes of camp life, often with soldiers grouped in front of tents or gathered in heroic poses around huge artillery pieces, provide vivid glimpses of the faces of men who fought and bases from which they operated.

In 1862, Brady exhibited in his Broadway gallery unflinching photographs taken by the gifted Gardner of the killing fields of Antietam, the ground carpeted with Union and Confederate dead. These shocking images dramatized the awesome finality of war in ways no list of casualties or reports of combat in newspapers could.

In addition to his likeness of Union commanders, Brady's studio also made portraits of such Confederate Army stalwarts as P.G.T. Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee. Brady first met Lee in 1845 when he made a dagguerreotype of the then-Lieutenant Colonel and his eight-year-old son in his New York studio. Twenty years later, after the South's defeat, the revered Confederate leader allowed himself to be photographed at his home in Richmond, Va.

Brady poured $100,000 into equipment, supplies, travel expenses, salaries and other costs involved in documenting the war. Even after he used up all his investments and savings, debts from the great Civil War project continued to plague him.

After the war, Brady faced increasingly stiff competition and his finances, already precarious, declined. He spent much of the remainder of his life fending off creditors. In 1872 he closed his New York gallery and filed for bankruptcy.

For years, Brady tried to sell his archive to the US Government. In 1875, after years of lobbying, Congress finally appropriated $25,000 to purchase his collection of negatives, enabling Brady to pay off most of his debts.

Throughout his career Brady associated with artists and photographed them, starting with daguerreotypes of Thomas Cole and G.P.A. Healy. Later came Magisterial photographs of sculptor Harriet Hosmer, special 1864 cartes de visite of such painters as Frederic E. Church, William Sidney Mount, and Rembrandt Peale.

Artists bent on perpetuating the traditions of Benjamin West and Emanuel Leutze - who created narrative pictures of momentous contemporary events - turned to Brady photographs for accurate likenesses of their subjects.

Healy used Brady images in creating "The Peacemakers" (1868), now in the White House collection, depicting a meeting among Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and Admiral David Dixon Porter, two weeks before Appomattox. For his composite bedside tableaux of leaders gathered around the mortally wounded Lincoln, painter Alonzo Chappel used photographs from Brady's studio. "The Last Hours of Lincoln," 1868, became a widely disseminated engraving.

In his later years Brady worked in the Washington studio of his nephew, Levin Handy, making portraits of visiting Indian delegations and participants in international conferences. But the old photographer's heart was not in such run-of-the-mill work. After his beloved wife, Juliette Handy Brady, died in 1887, advancing age, despondency and heavy drinking eroded Brady's health and reputation.

Back in New York in 1890, he opened a gallery where the main attraction seemed to be Brady himself, the grand old man of American photography. Severely injured in a street accident from which he never fully recovered, he died penniless in New York in 1896.

Appropriately, the funeral was financed by New York's Seventh Regiment, of which he was an honorary member. "In the end Brady was best loved by the soldiers he immortalized," observes Panzer. Brady was buried in Washington's Congressional Cemetery, where his grave can be seen today in what has become an endangered historic site.

The exhibition is accompanied by an outstanding book, Mathew Brady and the Image of History, written by Panzer, with an essay by Jeana Foley. Containing new and accurate information about the enigmatic Brady and his accomplishments, it includes over 150 photographs. Published by Smithsonian Institution Press, it is $39.95 hardcover.