Mathew Brady's portraits: a window on America - Smithsonian Institution. National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1997

Mathew Brady, the most famous American photographer of the 19th century, is best known for his project to document the Civil War. Years earlier, though, he had established his reputation through his studio's portraits of the nation's most famous individuals.

For the first time in more than a century, an exhibition of Brady's pictures will place the full range of his work before the public. "Mathew Brady's Portraits: Images as History, Photography as Art" covers the height of his career, from his early days in New York through the Civil War. It includes more than 130 images and objects, including artifacts from Brady's studio, such as original glassplate negatives and a studio register signed by his customers, as well as cameras, furniture, and posing stands.

Brady himself rarely used a camera. Instead, he was an entrepreneur and impresario who arranged and directed the photo sessions, publicized the collection, which he called The National Portrait Gallery, and established himself as the nation's historian. He collaborated with artists and printmakers to create oil paintings, lithographs, and wood engravings based on the photographs.

In Brady's studios in New York and Washington, D.C., visitors often came face to face with the most important Americans of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. His images brought men and women from the North and South together just as the Union was tearing apart. In 1860, one visitor to Brady's studio expressed the thought that, if all these people could meet in a single room, "how vastly all the world's disputes would be simplified; how many tears and troubles might mankind still be spared!"

From the start, Brady portrayed his contemporaries with an eye to the future, to reveal "what manner of men and women we Americans ... were." The exhibition fulfills that intention. It will be at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.. from Sept. 26 through Jan. 4, 1998. It will then travel to Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. (Jan. 22-April 15, 1998), and the International Center for Photography, New York (May 1-July 19, 1998).