During the Civil War Mathew Brady shocked the people of New York by taking pictures of battle fields, including the battle field of Antietam (1862) . He was the most famous photographer of the Civil War.

Mathew Brady was the son of Irish immigrants, and was born in 1823. Leaving home at the age of sixteen in 1839, he met William Page, a renown artist, who took Mathew in as a student. Page introduced Matthew to Samuel F.B. Morse, known for his invention of the telegraph in 1838, and who also was an accomplished painter and professor of painting and design at New York University. Brady became a painting student of Samuel Morse's.