General Robert E. Lee
1865
Medium
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions
Image: 14 × 9.3 cm (5 1/2 × 3 11/16 in.)
Classification
Photographs
Department
Photographs
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005
Accession Number
2005.100.1213
Tags
Art Historical Context
Captured in 1865, just after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Mathew B. Brady *General Robert E. Lee* a stark, intimate portrait of the Confederacy's most revered leader. Brady, a pioneering American photographer, documented the Civil War like no one before, hauling his bulky equipment to battlefields to create an unprecedented visual record. This image, taken amid national reconciliation, shows Lee in formal attire, his weary expression reflecting the war's toll and the dawn of a fractured peace. Printed as an albumen silver print from a glass negative—a technique that yie...
About the Artist
Mathew B. Brady · 1823–1896
Mathew B. Brady (c. 1823–1896) was an American photographer who became the most famous photographer of the Civil War era and one of the founding figures of American photographic history. Born in Warren County, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, he learned the daguerreotype process from Samuel F.B. Morse and William Page and opened his first portrait studio in New York City in 1844. Brady quick...