The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Howard Gilman Foundation recently announced that the museum has acquired the Gilman Paper Company Collection, widely regarded as the world’s finest collection of photographs in private hands.

With exceptional examples of Nineteenth Century French, British and American photographs, as well as masterpieces from the turn-of-the-century and modernist periods, the Gilman collection has played a central role in establishing photography’s historical canon and has long set the standard for connoisseurship in the field. In addition to many unique and beautiful icons of photography by such masters as Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, Mathew Brady, Carleton Watkins, Edward Steichen and Man Ray, the Gilman collection includes extensive bodies of work by numerous pioneers of the camera.

The collection was acquired through purchase, complemented by a gift from the foundation. It contains more than 8,500 photographs, dating primarily from the first century of the medium, 1839-1939.

The Gilman Paper Company Collection was formed over the course of two decades (roughly 1977-1997) by Howard Gilman, chairman of the Gilman Paper Company until his death in January 1998, and his curator Pierre Apraxine. Although they began by collecting photographs made during the first half of the Twentieth Century, after several years they turned to the relatively unexplored terrain of the Nineteenth Century.

In the ensuing years, Mr Gilman and Mr Apraxine built a world-renowned collection that includes not only recognized and celebrated monuments in the history of photography, but also newly discovered artists and individual photographs that quickly assumed iconic status in their own right. The beautiful and mysterious “Woman Seen from the Back,” circa 1862, by the little-known French photographer Onésipe Aguado is one such example; reproduced on the cover of the Metropolitan’s 1993 exhibition catalog, The Waking Dream, the photograph is now recognized as among the most elegant and enigmatic portraits of its time.

Other Nineteenth Century French photographs – an area of particular strength in the Gilman collection – include early daguerreotypes such as Choiselat and Ratel’s dazzling “Pavillon de Flore and the Tuileries Gardens,” 1849; portraits by the famed Nadar and his brother Adrien Tournachon, whose “Self Portrait,” circa 1855, reveals a sensitive and curiously sly artist in a sketching hat and smock; 21 photographs by Gustave Le Gray, including dramatic seascapes and dappled forest scenes; and extensive explorations of Egypt and the Holy Land by Maxime du Camp, Félix Teynard, Auguste Salzmann and Louis de Clercq.

Among the exceptional examples of Nineteenth Century English photography are early, experimental photographs by the medium’s inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot (“Botanical Specimen,” 1835?); rare masterworks of landscape, architectural, still life, portrait and documentary photography by Roger Fenton; portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron, including “Philip Stanhope Worsley,” 1864-66, a mesmerizing portrait of the poet that suggests both his intellectual intensity and his impending death from tuberculosis; fine examples of Lewis Carroll’s photographs of children, most notably his portrait of the girl made famous by his Alice stories, Alice Liddell as “The Beggar Maid,” circa 1859.

Slavery, the abolitionist movement and the Civil War are represented in a deep and nuanced way in the American photographs of the Gilman collection. Among the works centered on this theme are a rare and particularly sensitive portrait showing the 51-year-old Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Ill., soon after he received his first nomination for the presidency.

Turn-of-the-century works of particular note in the Gilman collection include Edward Steichen’s large and painterly composite photograph “Rodin – The Thinker,” 1902, a print that the artist referred to as “mon chef d’oeuvre, mon enfant”; George Seeley’s highly abstract “Winter Landscape,” 1909; and nearly 50 prints by Eugene Atget. The fertile period of visual experimentation between the two world wars is represented by three unique exhibition prints from Paul Strand’s most creative moment, circa 1916; ten works by Man Ray; the sole known print of Charles Sheeler’s “Upper Deck,” circa 1928; more than two dozen photographs by Walker Evans; and major works by Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, August Sander, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others.

In announcing the acquisition, Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan, noted that during the 1990s, Mr Gilman and Mr Apraxine had worked in unison with Maria Morris Hambourg, then curator in charge of the Metropolitan’s department of photographs, to shape the Gilman Paper Company Collection as a perfect complement to that of the museum. Under Ms Hambourg’s direction, the museum presented a selection of more than 250 masterpieces from the Gilman collection in 1993 in the exhibition “The Waking Dream.”

Photographs from the Gilman collection have been included in nearly every Metropolitan Museum photography exhibition and installation since.

The museum announced that a changing selection of masterpieces from the Gilman collection will be on view in the museum’s Robert Wood Johnson Jr Gallery beginning April 17, and continuing for the next year. In addition, selected works from the Gilman collection will be on view in two special exhibitions already scheduled to appear at the Metropolitan later this year: “All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860” in the Robert Lehman Wing, May 24 through August 21; and “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult” in the Harriette and Noel Levine Gallery and The Howard Gilman Gallery, September 27 through December 31.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. For information, www.metmuseum.org or 212-535-7710.