Artist

Timothy H. O’Sullivan

born Ireland 1840-died New York City 1882
Also known as
  • T. H. O'Sullivan
  • Timothy O'Sullivan
Born
Ireland
Died
New York, Richmond County, New York, United States
Biography

O'Sullivan began his photography career as an apprentice in Mathew Brady's Fulton Street gallery in New York City and then moved on to the Washington, D.C., branch managed by Alexander Gardner. In 1861, at the age of twenty-one, O'Sullivan joined Brady's team of Civil War photographers. When Gardner left Brady, O'Sullivan went with him, working for Gardner until the end of the war. Several of his images were included in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. O'Sullivan built his reputation on images that conveyed the destructive power of modern warfare. His photographs of Forts Fisher and Sedgwick suggest the dismal psychological as well as physical effect of continual barrages of distant cannon fire on the soldiers behind the barricades.

In 1867 O'Sullivan joined Clarence King's geological survey of the fortieth parallel—the first federal expedition in the West after the Civil War. The letter of authorization, dated March 21, 1867, from Brigadier General A. A. Humphreys, chief of engineers, Department of War, charged King "to direct a geological and topographical exploration of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, including the route or routes of the Pacific railroad." O'Sullivan was strongly influenced by King's interest in the arts (he was a member of the Ruskinian group, the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art), as well as by contemporary science and its attendant controversies. His work for the King survey often functioned as both objective scientific documentation and a personal evocation of the fantastic and beautiful qualities of the western landscape.

In 1871 O'Sullivan joined the geological surveys west of the one hundredth meridian, under the command of Lieutenant George M. Wheeler of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. An army man rather than a civilian scientist like King, Wheeler insisted on a survey that would be of practical value. His reports included information likely to be useful in the establishment of roads and rail routes and the development of economic resources. Wheeler's captions for O'Sullivan's pictures provide geological information but also emphasize that the West was a hospitable place for settlers. For example, he compared Shoshone Falls favorably to Niagara Falls, the most popular American symbol of nature's grandeur. Indeed, O'Sullivan's 1874 image of Shoshone Falls, a version of a nearly identical image of the falls he made for King six years before in 1868, emphasized perspective as picturesque as it was dramatically precipitant.

Flat-bottomed boats were used to go up the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to the mouth of Diamond Creek. O'Sullivan commanded one of the boats, which he christened The Picture. Many of his negatives on glass plates were lost in transport, but surviving views of the Colorado's canyons are among his finest.

In 1873 O'Sullivan led an independent expedition for Wheeler, visiting the Zuni and Magia pueblos and the Canyon de Chelly, with its remnants of a cliff-dwelling culture. O'Sullivan's 1873 images of Apache scouts are among the few unromanticized pictures of the western Indian, unlike those of many ethnographic photographers who posed Indians in the studio or outdoors against neutral backgrounds.

Merry A. Foresta American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996)

Exhibitions

This is an albumen print of a water fall by O'Sullivan
Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan
February 12, 2010–May 8, 2010
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Timothy H. O'Sullivan (1840–1882) was a photographer for two of the most ambitious geographical surveys of the nineteenth century. He traversed the mountain and desert regions of the western United States under the command of Clarence King and Lt.
A photograph of a tricycle at a low angle
A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
June 27, 2013–January 5, 2014
Smithsonian American Art Museum
A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum celebrates the numerous ways in which photography, from early daguerreotypes to contemporary digital works, has captured the American experience.

Related Books

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Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan
Few photographers have captured more compelling images of the untamed American West than Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Trained under Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, O’Sullivan accompanied two government surveys of the West in the 1860s and 1870s with geologist Clarence King and Lieutenant George M. Wheeler. Along these journeys, O’Sullivan produced photographs that exhibit a forthright and rigorous style formed in response to the landscapes he encountered. Faced with challenging terrain and lacking previous photographic examples on which to rely, O’Sullivan created a body of work that was without precedent in its visual and emotional complexities.
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American Photographs: The First Century from the Isaacs Collection in the National Museum of American Art
In the nineteenth century, people from all walks of life embraced the new medium of photography with unparalleled enthusiasm. For artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, it was “one of the beauties of the age.” Edgar Allan Poe hailed photography as “the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.” Here was a medium, it was proposed, that could serve as a mirror of nature, suggesting new possibilities to artists. For the average citizen, less concerned with art or science, the medium offered a satisfying way to record his or her private world—family, friends, homes, and farms.
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The Civil War and American Art
The Civil War and American Art looks at the range of artwork created in the years between 1852 and 1877. Author Eleanor Jones Harvey surveys paintings made by some of America’s finest artists, including Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Gifford, Winslow Homer, and Eastman Johnson, and photographs taken by George Barnard, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O’Sullivan.