[March 17th
is St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday
that is apparently a far
bigger deal in the U.S. than in Ireland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a
handful of famous Irish American cultural figures, leading up to a post on some
wonderful Irish American literary voices!]
On a couple
historical contexts beyond the Civil War for that conflict’s most famous
photographer.
I’m not sure
exactly what the percentage would be, but a significant chunk of my visual
perspective on the Civil War comes from the photographs
of Mathew Brady (he really did only have one ‘t’ in his first name—who knew?).
I’ve blogged
before about Bruce Catton’s wonderful American
Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, and along with that book’s
stunning battle maps, Catton used Brady’s photographs to great effect throughout.
Over time I learned that Brady
and his assistants posed some of his post-battle photographs, which only
makes sense given the striking amount of time it took to take a picture in the
1860s. And I don’t think those details invalidate at all the importance of
Brady’s photojournalism (and that of the men who worked with him, such as Alexander
Gardner’s photos of Antietam), particularly in bringing home the war’s
effects on individual soldiers, on the battlefields themselves, on every aspect
of the material world. I’m quite sure that Brady’s
photographs had an impact on Americans’ perspectives on the unfolding war,
and I know they did on the understanding of this AmericanStudier more than a
century later.
The war was only
a handful of years in a life that spanned most of the 19th century
(1822-1896), though, and if we broaden our scope Brady’s professional career
also connects to other important historical contexts. The son of Irish American
immigrants in New York state, Brady began an apprenticeship when he was 16
years old to the talented portrait painter George
William Gage, and through him met Gage’s former teacher, the painter and inventor
Samuel Morse. Morse had learned
about the new science and art of daguerrotyping from none other than Louis
Daguerre himself, and was one of the first
to bring this new technology back to the United States. He opened a studio
in New York City, and Brady was one of the first students, becoming proficient
enough to open his own
photography studio in the city in 1844. These details help explain Brady’s
own journey toward becoming one of the nation’s first famous photographers, but
they also illuminate the bridges between painting (and specifically
portraiture), daguerrotyping, and photography. Photography would then continue
to influence the
rise of realism in painting and the visual arts later in the century,
adding more layers to these complex cultural interconnections—which in America
would remain closely linked to Mathew Brady for the whole second half of the 19th
century.
Brady’s
photographic career also significantly influenced national perspectives on some
of our most prominent cultural and political figures. As early as 1850, Brady
organized a collection entitled The
Gallery of Illustrious Americans, which featured his photographs of
such icons as Edgar
Allan Poe and Daniel
Webster. Brady photographed
Abraham Lincoln on a number of occasions, with some
of those influential pictures used as the model for Lincoln’s likeness on
the $5 bill and the penny. Indeed, before the end of his life, Brady would
photograph all but one of
the presidents between John Quincy Adams and William McKinley (he missed
out on William
Henry Harrison, who died after just a few short months in office). In an
era when we see and hear more of our presidents and political figures than we
could possibly want, it’s difficult to remember how rare that was, even as
recently as the famous 1960 televised
debate between Kennedy and Nixon. It was really Mathew Brady who first
presented Americans with that opportunity, one more striking legacy of this
hugely influential Irish American artist and figure.
Next Irish
American tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Irish Americans you’d highlight?
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