Dutch Gap Canal
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933
Accession Number
33.65.253
Tags
Art Historical Context
**Dutch Gap Canal, 1865** Captured in 1865 at the close of the American War, this albumen silver print from a negative depicts the ambitious Dutch Gap Canal project near, Virginia. Photographed by Andrew Joseph Russell Egbert Guy Fowx, and the renowned Mathew B. Brady—key figures in wartime documentation—the image showcases men laboring amid the canal's earthen works. Albumen prints, popular in the mid-19th century, richly toned, detailed images from glass negatives, making them ideal for preserving the stark realities of conflict. The Dutch Gap Canal was a Union engineering feat during the ...
About the Artist
Andrew Joseph Russell|Egbert Guy Fowx|Mathew B. Brady · 1830–1902
Andrew Joseph Russell (1829–1902) was a pioneering American photographer whose work captured the raw drama of the Civil War and the monumental engineering of the transcontinental railroad. Born on March 20, 1829, in Walpole, New Hampshire, to Joseph Russell and Harriet Robinson, he grew up in Nunda, New York, where he developed an early passion for painting, creating portraits, landscapes, and eve...