Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Superintendent of the Census
Mathew B. Brady American, born Ireland
Not on view
By the mid-1850s, the popularity of the one-of-a-kind daguerreotype was giving way to the advantages of reproducible paper prints from collodion-on-glass negatives. Matthew Brady, who learned the technique of the daguerreotype from Samuel F. B. Morse, was an early and active practitioner, eventually presiding over two gallery establishments in New York and one in Washington, D.C. He adopted the collodion process around 1854 and used it to assemble his documentation of the Civil War. Here, in an intriguing combination of the two techniques, Brady used a glass negative to re-photograph a daguerreotype portrait of a government bureaucrat, creating a strangely poetic picture of a picture.
