Matthew Brady Studios NY ca 1869

Factual Questions
1

Background: I have a second edition of the Scott “Postage Stamp Album” issued in 1870, copyright 1869. Mr. Scott, of Nassau St. in NYC, had a sheet of small labels showing notable world leaders printed, including himself <g>. These albumen prints are postage stamp sized, and were intended to be placed in the album. (WikiCommons now has an image of the John Walter Scott label)

Most of them are photos of painted portraits, but some are of specific known photos - such as Brady’s photo of Grant, the Berger photo of Lincoln (for Brady), a Jeff Davis photo (beardless - ca 1861?) which may or may not be by Brady, but is in the National Archives, and so on.

A local college photography department has no one with the slightest idea about all of this, so I hope one of the teeming millions can help.

My suspicion is that mass producing tiny photos in a multi-subject sheet (45 images, it appears), in a large enough quantity (say 1000 copies) would have required a large photo studio in NYC, and, as some images were owned by Brady, the chances are good that these are done at his “factory” ca. 1869, and I know of no other cases where such miniatures were produced in quantity at all, that these may be the first stamp sized photos.

Can anyone help me at all - or am I just stuck at the level of surmise?

Many thanks!

2

A few questions:

  1. Can you give me a link to how you know the original “sheet” had 45 images? Is there a list of the individuals pictured? Link, if so.
  2. Are there 45 spaces for the labels in your album? Where are the spaces? Are they all on the same page? One per page?
3

The album states that there are numbered spaces for the labels. I count 44 labels in my album, and 1 label space without a label. Thus I posit the labels were in a sheet of 45, which had to be manually cut apart. The images were not ones which would have been readily available to miscellaneous people - the photo of Jeff Davis is the one labeled as “as a young man” in the Naval archives. The Lincoln photo is the Berger photo. The Grant photo is one attributed to Brady’s studio. The photo of Dom Pedro II of Brazil is the same portrait used on the Brazil stamps of 1866.

While Scott has his image at the start, and Washington, Lincoln and Grant are on the same page for United States, the other figures are placed with the places they represented - Duke William is at Brunswick, Dom Pedro II at Brazil, and so on. Many of them appear to be from original photographs, but very greatly reduced in size.

Many, many thanks to you for your help in this - I fear some of the images may now be unique or nearly so, as there are no albums of this type that have been sold in recent years, and certainly none I can find with these labels.