Brady opened his own studio in New York City in 1844, and went on to photograph U.S. presidents John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Millard Fillmore, Martin Van Buren, and other public figures.

[4] Morse had met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France in 1839, and returned to the US to enthusiastically push the new daguerreotype invention of capturing images.

[6][better source needed] In 1844, Brady opened his own photography studio at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street in New York,[7][8] and by 1845, he began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans, including the likes of Senator Daniel Webster and writer Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1849, he opened a studio at 625 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., where he met Juliet (whom everybody called 'Julia') Handy, whom he married in 1850 and lived with on Staten Island.

The album, which featured noteworthy images including the elderly Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, was not financially rewarding but invited increased attention to Brady's work and artistry.

[12] At first, the effect of the Civil War on Brady's business was a brisk increase in sales of cartes de visite to departing soldiers.

Brady marketed to parents the idea of capturing their young soldiers' images before they might be lost to war by running an ad in the New-York Daily Tribune that warned, "You cannot tell how soon it may be too late.

He first applied to an old friend, General Winfield Scott, for permission to have his photographers travel to the battle sites, and eventually he made his application to President Lincoln himself.

[2] His efforts to document the Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history.

His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run,[dubious – discuss] in which he got so close to the action that he barely avoided capture.

There are thousands of photos in the National Archives and the Library of Congress taken by Brady and his associates, Alexander Gardner, George Barnard and Timothy O'Sullivan.

[15] Following the conflict, a war-weary public lost interest in seeing photos of the war, and Brady's popularity and practice declined drastically.

Despite a recommendation from Congress' Joint Committee on the Library,[16] the government declined to do so and Brady was forced to sell his New York City studio and file for bankruptcy.

Depressed by his financial situation and loss of eyesight, and devastated by the death of his wife in 1887, Brady died penniless in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on January 15, 1896, from complications from a street-car accident.

The exception was the ninth president, William Henry Harrison, who died in office three years before Brady started his photographic collection.

Brady photographed and made portraits of many senior Union officers in the war, including: On the Confederate side, Brady photographed Jefferson Davis, P. G. T. Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, Albert Pike, James Longstreet, James Henry Hammond, Henry Hopkins Sibley, and Robert E.

Such a "Brady stand" of the mid-19th century typically had a weighty cast iron base for stability, plus an adjustable-height single-column pipe leg for dual use as either a portrait model's armrest or (when fully extended and fitted with a brace attachment rather than the usual tabletop) as a neck rest.

They "were kicked about from pillar to post" for 10 years, until John C. Taylor found them in an attic and bought them; from this they became "the backbone of the Ordway–Rand collection; and in 1895 Brady himself had no idea of what had become of them.

Indeed, the picture of Brady in a straw hat shown in this article is reproduced as a stereoscopic side-by-side image on page 12 of The Civil War in Depth.

[29] In October 2012, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine displayed 21 original Mathew Brady photographs from 1862 documenting the Battle of Antietam.