The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has announced a promised gift of more than seven hundred American photographs and albums from the 1840s to the 1910s from trustee Philip Maritz and his wife, Jennifer.

In celebration of the museum's hundred and fiftieth anniversary later this year, the pledge includes rare photographs — daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, ambrotypes, tintypes, albumen silver prints, cyanotypes, platinum prints, and gelatin silver prints — from the private collection of Drew Knowlton and William L. Schaeffer. A selection of daguerreotypes and early paper prints from the gift is included in the recently opened 2020 Vision: Photographs, 1840s–1860s exhibition, which features some fifty new gifts of photographs made before the museum's founding in 1870 — by which time photography had already developed into a complex pictorial language of documentation, social and scientific inquiry, self-expression, and artistic endeavor.

The Met also announced the acquisition of seventy American Civil War photographs from the William L. Schaeffer Collection with funds provided by trustee Joyce Frank Menschel.

"Brilliantly amassed over forty-five years, the William L. Schaeffer Collection includes extraordinary examples of every format of photography, from the birth of the medium in 1839 to the modern era," said Jeff Rosenheim, the Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. "With these unusual and little-known historical works, the Met will now be able to rewrite the narrative of American photography by associating established early masters of the genre — Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Charles DeForest Fredricks, and Carleton Watkins — with generally unknown makers whose lives and works have yet to be fully studied and presented to the general public."