Young Brady?

The pioneer American photographer Mathew Brady took an enormous number of portraits but sat for relatively few. The best known of those that have survived appears below to the right. So far no portraits of the young Brady have come to light. Recently, however, the owners of America Hurrah, a New York City antiques shop that specializes in photographica, showed us the daguerreotype at the lower left. We—and the Library of Congress—suspect that the agreeable-looking young subject is Mathew Brady, peering out from his earliest known portrait.