Wall Street, Half Past Two O'clock, October 13, 1857
1858
James Cafferty (1819 -1869) and Charles G. Rosenberg (1818 -1879)
Oil on canvas, 50 X 40
Signed lower left on stair risers: cafferty 1858 / rosenberg
Gift of the Honorable Irwin Untermyer, 40.54

 

On October 13, 1857, a series of events set in motion two months earlier culminated in the suspension of specie payments by all but one of New York's fifty-eight banks, resulting in a financial panic. Banking did not resume until December 12 of that year. Unemployment rose sharply and real estate values fell precipitously; railroads, banks, and brokerages failed; and new construction in the city all but ceased. The crisis (or "revulsion," as contemporary terminology labeled it) typified the boom-and-bust cycles to which Wall Street and the nation's other financial markets were subject. The Panic of 1857 put nearly half of Wall Street's brokers out of business, altered trading styles, and led to a period of wild speculation.¹ A reporter for the New York Herald observed: "By 1 o'clock p.m. everybody in business, and a great many out of business or with no business, rushed to Wall Street, which soon became densely crowded and streams of people could be seen entering and emerging from the various banking houses."² This is the scene dramatized by artists James Cafferty and Charles G. Rosenberg.

Other than the great crowd of people in the street and a few anxious faces, nothing in the action or composition conveys the panic of the occasion. The view is along Wall Street, looking west from William Street to Broadway, where the clock of Trinity Church displays the notorious moment frozen for all time. To the right is the Bank of America, at the northwest corner of Wall and William Streets; two doors to its left is the Merchant's Bank; the Doric-style Custom House (now the Federal Hall National Memorial) stands at the intersection of Wall and Nassau Streets; and on the far left is the Insurance Building. Most of these impressive new structures were built to house banks and other businesses. They exemplify the emergence of specialized commercial areas as the city grew in population and complexity. These edifices suggest the metamorphosis of the New York Stock Exchange itself from an informal street-corner affair started by twenty-four self-proclaimed "brokers" into a dominant enterprise in the district, with suites of offices, a constitution, and perhaps as many as two hundred broker members.³ Originally a residential area and then one of mixed-use buildings, Wall Street by the mid-nineteenth century was home to only a single "family."

Although the key that once identified the foreground figures in the painting has been lost,⁴ several people active in the 1857 crisis are recognizable: Cornelius Vanderbilt, arguably the era's most significant manipulator of markets, on the extreme right; Jacob Little, a major figure in the country's mid-nineteenth- century railroad expansion, in the center wearing a light gray drovers' topcoat; Frederick Hudson, managing editor of the New York Herald and the brother of E. W. Hudson, who commissioned this painting, visible next to the bearded man on the left; and the bearded man himself, a self-portrait of the artist Cafferty.⁵ The prominence given to the figures of the unknown newsboys reflects the mid-nineteenth-century interest in artistic representations of common people and occupations, a marked change from earlier painters' preoccupation with historic subjects, landscapes, and portraits of affluent patrons. Cafferty frequently depicted working children, whose condition he viewed as part of the harsh realities of urban life.⁶ The involvement of the artists' patron in news dissemination might also have contributed to the focus on newsboys.

Wall Street, Half Past Two O'clock, October 13, 1857 was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1858. The combined effort of two artists is uncommon but not unknown. James Cafferty, who worked largely as a portraitist, and Charles G. Rosenberg, who pursued a dual career as an author and painter, collaborated artistically on more than one occasion. In the past, it was thought that Cafferty painted the figures while Rosenberg executed the architectural elements, but recent research indicates that Rosenberg may have painted some of the figures as well. He was, according to critics of the period, an accomplished artist, lauded for his "effective use of light, masterly grouping of figures, and skillful character studies."⁷ As for Cafferty, his exhibition entries at the National Academy of Design over a twenty-year period list landscapes, genres, and still lifes as well as portraits, including those of fellow artists Jasper Cropsey, John M. Falconer, Samuel Raymond Fanshaw, and Thomas Dow Jones.

Notes:

  1  Maxine Friedman, Wall Street: Changing Fortune (New York: Fraunces Tavern Museum, 1990), p. 39.

  2  Quoted in Grace M. Mayer, "A Painting of the 'Revulsion' of 1857," Bulletin of the Museum of the City of New York, no. 3 (May 1940): 71.

  3  Stephen Wheeler, archivist of the New York Stock Exchange, has estimated this figure based on the figure of 112 members in 1848 published in William Armstrong, Stock and Stock-Jobbing in Wall Street (New York: New-York Publishing Company, 1848).

  4  Grace M. Mayer, in "A Painting of the 'Revulsion' of 1857," referred to "a once existent key" but wrote that the catalogue of the auction (presumably the auction at which Judge Irwin Untermyer bought this painting) listed the "safely identifiable characters shown in the painting."

  5  David Stewart Hull, James Henry Cafferty, N. A. (1819 -1869) (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1986), p. 33.

  6  Ibid., p. 17.

  7  Natalie Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), vol. 2, p. 96.