National Portrait Gallery
Meserve Collection Highlights: Modern Prints from Mathew Brady’s Portrait Negatives
May 23, 2025 – May 14, 2028
Photographer Mathew Brady (c. 1823 –1896) may be best remembered today for his role in producing a remarkable visual record of the Civil War (1861–65). Yet he initially gained fame as a portrait photographer more than a decade before the war began.
Among Brady’s most popular offerings were small, card-mounted photographs known as cartes de visite. Modestly priced, they fueled the rapid growth of a mass market for photographic portraiture from the time of their introduction in the United States in 1859. Brady’s studios produced thousands of glass-plate negatives from which countless prints were made.
In 1981, the National Portrait Gallery acquired more than 5,400 Brady studio negatives. Originally assembled as part of a larger collection by amateur historian Frederick Hill Meserve, they offer an extraordinary pictorial index of the prominent figures of the Civil War era. The exhibition includes nine modern prints from Brady’s original photographic negatives. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ulysses S. Grant, and Emma, Queen of Hawai‘i are featured, along with an original, glass-plate negative and one of Brady’s wooden storage boxes.
Mary Todd Lincoln, Attribution: Mathew Brady Studio, Modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative 1861 (printed 1982) National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection
