Lieutenant General Scott, General-in-Chief, U.S. Army and Staff
Mathew Brady (American, 1823–1896)
1861
- Medium
- Albumen print
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image/paper: 26.4 × 37 cm (10 7/16 × 14 5/8 in.); Mount: 34.2 × 42.9 cm (13 1/2 × 16 15/16 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- Gift of the Blum-Kovler Foundation
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
An entrepreneur as much as a photographer, Mathew Brady was celebrated as a great portraitist of national figures from Daniel Webster to Abraham Lincoln. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he oversaw a group of photographers documenting the camps, officers, and aftermath (battles themselves were impossible to capture with existing camera technology); he published these as a series titled Brady’s Incidents of the War. Here Brady depicted officers surrounding Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, one of the Union Army’s most acclaimed and decorated officers, with dignity and resolve, as if posing in the studio rather than ready to meet the battlefield. Hugh Edwards, a native Kentuckian whose grandfather had fought in the battle of Shiloh, held a lifelong interest in the Civil War and helped build the museum’s collection of 19th-century photography.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
