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Condition: All items are offered for sale subject to Swann Galleries'' standard terms and conditions of sale, which are published in our catalogues.

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Notes: From a private collection; to the present owner in 2004.


Matthew Brady opened a daguerreian photography studio on lower Broadway, in New York City, in 1844. He was quickly recognized as one of America''s greatest portrait photographers. A decade later he expanded his business to start a studio in Washington, D.C., where he photographed American political and foreign dignitaries.


In 1861, at the peak of his success, Brady turned his attention to the Civil War. Working with a team of photographers (or "operators") he set out to document the war on a grand scale, even photographing troops in the field. This image, which recalls studies by Gustave LeGray of Chalons, in 1857, is a remarkably detailed large-format view of military maneuvers in the Union camp.

Although Brady did not actually shoot many of the Civil War photographs attributed to him, he dictated the scope of the coverage. He spent most of his time supervising his corps of traveling photographers, preserving their negatives and buying others from private photographers freshly returned from the battlefield, so that his collection would be as comprehensive as possible. When photographs from his collection were published, whether printed by Brady or adapted as engravings in publications, they were credited "Photograph by Brady," although they were actually the work of many people. Brady was one of the first photographers to understand photography as a visual language and employed the medium to chronicle national history.