The exhibition gallery at 233 Broadway, where hundreds of daguerreotypes were on display. According to an 1852 article in Gleason’s Pictorial magazine, the Meade brothers had 10 assistants helping them in their studio.
More than a century and a half ago, during the 1840s, the early photographic images known as daguerreotypes were all the rage in the U.S. Invented by the French scene painter and physicist Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, they were produced on silver-coated copper plates treated with iodine vapor. By 1839 they were being made throughout Europe, and about that time the process was introduced in the U.S. by Samuel F. B. Morse, better known as the inventor of the telegraph.
Although most practitioners were itinerant portraitists who traveled from town to town, many operated on a large scale. One of the most successful concerns was run by the Meade Brothers, who were located at 233 Broadway where the Woolworth Building now stands.
Born in England, the two brothers, Henry and Charles, came to this country in the 1830s. In 1842, observing the newfound popularity of the daguerreotype process, they founded a studio in Albany, N.Y., where they perfected the art of portraiture and mastered the processing of the resulting pictures.
Soon they had opened branch studios in Syracuse and Buffalo, and in 1850 they made their biggest plunge by launching their impressive daguerreotype facility at 233 Broadway. The studio that ranked among the largest in the world.
They then closed all their other studios to concentrate on the new location.
The key feature of their new building was its exhibition gallery that showcased hundreds of their works, including portraits of such well-known personalities as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, President James Buchanan and the Lincoln assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth.
Most of the portraits shown in the gallery were small, but there were also larger scenic pictures, for ever since their Albany days the brothers had traveled widely to photograph well-known sites such as Niagara Falls and the Capitol; now they included foreign spots, among them the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame and Shakespeare’s home. Many of these pictures were quite large—up to 16 by 20 inches—as daguerreotypes could retain their sharpness even when greatly enlarged.
Eager to add new images to their inventory, the brothers went to Europe in most years to produce more scenic views as well as to photograph celebrities. So the exhibits were constantly changing, making the gallery a lodestone for artisans, engravers, lithographers and other specialists in addition to the wider public.
The gallery, of course, was only one aspect of the operation, for behind the scenes were portrait studios and even larger spaces for group pictures such as school classes and military companies, plus elaborate processing facilities.
Although Henry Meade died in 1858, the firm continued to prosper through most of the Civil War until Charles’s death in early 1865, when it went out of business. By that time, the demand for daguerreotypes was waning as new photographic processes such as tintypes and glass negatives were taking over—radical technological shifts, the likes of which are all too familiar to us today.