Mathew Brady's name shines brightly, not only as a pioneer photographer, but also as an invaluable recorder of history.
In his own time, Brady was famous for the technical advances he contributed to photography, as well as for the pictures he took. His striking photographs won many medals at home and abroad. To his fashionable galleries in New York City and Washington, D.C., swarmed the great, the near-great, and the would-be-great. Brady photographed Presidents and Princes, and such notables as P.T. Barnum, General Tom Thumb and his bride, and The Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind.
For us in our time, Brady's greatest importance lies in his dedicated determination to photograph history. He made photographic portraits of every President of the United States from John Quincy Adams, the sixth President, through William McKinley, the twenty-fifth, except for William Henry Harrison, who died a month after his inauguration in 1841, and before Brady began his career. His ambitious project of covering the Civil War photographically led ultimately to his financial ruin. The hard times following the War, the sums he spent on the battlefields, and the decline of popular interest in photography as its novelty wore off, all these things helped bring Brady to bankruptcy. He died alone in a charity ward in 1896, virtually forgotten.
But history, which he had served so faithfully, ultimately repaid his services by making him America's best known photographer in the 20th century. That Brady fell by the time of his death into almost total obscurity is a sad commentary on the fate often befalling an artist. That he should rise again in the second half of the 20th century to his present fame is a glorious reminder of the essential and inevitable immortality of true art.
—from the book
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