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[[underline]] Proposed Private Bill and Agreement to Acquire the Meserve Collection of Portrait Photographs for the National Portrait Gallery [[/underline]]

Mr. Ripley noted that the most celebrated name in the history of American photography is that of Mathew Brady--and justifiably so--for Brady, though one of the nation's earliest photographers, ranks among the most brilliant practitioners of the art that America has produced. Through Mathew Brady's eyes we see, superbly recorded (often in multiple examples), every major figure from the late 1850s through the Civil War and its aftermath.

A vast collection of approximately 7250 original glass plate negatives of these Brady portrait photographs was acquired by the late Frederick Hill Meserve in 1902. From that time until Meserve's death at the age of 96 in 1962, and subsequently while owned by his daughter Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt (who died in December 1979), almost no study dealing with any aspect of American history, illustrated with portraits of individuals represented in this collection could be accomplished without the use of the Meserve photographs. [The collection also includes the only original print ever made from the glass plate negative of the last photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken by Brady's associate Alexander Gardner. The plate cracked while Gardner was developing this photograph and he therefore discarded the negative without producing any further prints from it.]