Black-and-white Mathew Brady studio portrait of a woman in a dress holding flowers

National Portrait GalleryPenn Quarter / Chinatown

Meserve Collection Highlights: Modern Prints from Mathew Brady's Portrait Negatives

Now showing23 May 2025 – 14 May 2028Free

Nine modern prints struck from Mathew Brady's original Civil War-era negatives — Lincoln, Hawthorne, Grant and Emma, Queen of Hawai'i — shown with a glass plate and Brady's wooden storage box.

Exhibition website

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On now All of October 2026

The Mary Todd Lincoln here was photographed in 1861 and printed in 1982: a fresh albumen print made from the glass negative Brady's studio exposed 121 years earlier. Every picture in the show works that way. In 1981 the museum bought more than 5,400 Brady studio negatives gathered by amateur historian Frederick Hill Meserve, and this show prints nine of them.

You walk past Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ulysses S. Grant and Emma, Queen of Hawai'i, then reach the hardware: an original glass-plate negative and one of Brady's wooden storage boxes. Before the war made his name, Brady ran a portrait business, and cheap card-mounted cartes de visite, sold from 1859, put faces like these into ordinary homes. The Washington Post's Angelica Hankins found the display intimate and the portraits "at once quiet and stirring", sitters in spare rooms and demure clothes.

Nine prints make it a short stop in the first-floor East Galleries. It's free with no timed tickets, open daily 11:30am to 7pm, through 14 May 2028.

Look for

The glass plate and Brady's storage box
Look for an original glass-plate negative from Brady's studio beside one of the wooden boxes the studio kept its plates in, the kind of object every print here started from.
Lincoln in 1861
A modern albumen print from Brady's 1861 negative of Lincoln, composed and solemn-eyed, which the Post's critic singles out as the mood of all Brady's Lincolns.