National Portrait Gallery

Mathew Brady: Antebellum Portraits

Mathew Brady: Antebellum Portraits

Mathew Brady may be best known today for his Civil War–era photographs, but he established his reputation as an internationally acclaimed portrait photographer more than a decade before the war. Brady opened his first daguerreotype portrait studio in New York City in 1844, just five years after the introduction of the first commercially practical form of photography. By 1851, he…