Album of carte de visite photographs from the Civil War era, containing portraits, including many of Union Army soldiers and officers, produced at the photography studio of Matthew B. Brady, the National Photographic Portrait Galleries, probably the New York studio, including five portraits of women and two of young children.

Nineteenth-century American photographer, best known for his portraits and documentation of the American Civil War. Mathew Brady came to New York as a young man of sixteen, worked as a jewelry case designer, and on the side studied photography with various teachers, one of whom was the photography pioneer, Samuel F. B. Morse. He eventually established studios in New York in 1844, and in Washington, D.C. in 1849, and began earning awards for his daguerrotypes portraits, and later, his ambrotypes and albumen prints. His studios did a brisk business in producing carte de visite portraits for soldiers about to go to the front, as the Civil War broke out in 1862. Brady set out to document the war, and organized a staff of travelling photographers, including Alexander and James Gardner, T. H. O'Sullivan, T. C. Roche, S. C. Chester, and David Knox, whom he sent out into the field to record the people, places, and battles of the war. Despite his great achievments and prominent place in the history of photography, Brady died alone and impoverished on Jan. 15, 1896.

1 album (32 photographic prints on carte de visite mounts) : albumen, 16 x 13 cm (album)

Title-page bordered in purple and gilt frame, with title "Album for Photographs" in purple and gilt, with name along lower margin of New York lithographer Frederick (Friedrich Ludwig) Heppenheimer (1826-1878): "Lith. of F. Heppenheimer, 22 & 24 N. William St., N.Y."

Album contains 32 carte de visite photographs (approx. 16.1 x 10.1 cm), consisting of paper photographs mounted on thin cardboard backs, with printed logo on verso of Matthew Brady's New York and Washington, D.C. studios ( "Brady's National Photographic Portrait Galleries, Broadway & Tenth Street, New York: and 352 Pennsylvania Av. Washington"), each of which is slipped into a sleeve on recto and verso of 20 album leaves, in which a gilt-framed window has been cut. Eight of the windows are empty.

Bound in 19th-century light brown leather; both covers decorated with deeply-embossed cartouche within an embossed border with ornamental corner-pieces; embossed decoration on spine; two large ornamental brass clasps; all edges gilt; gold and white decorated endpapers.

Spec. Coll. copy: in beige cloth clamshell box, with box label "Brady Portrait Album."

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