ABSTRACT
William Holbrook Beard’s The Bulls and Bears in the Market has been read as simple stock market allegory. When reconsidered as an urban view, Beard’s canvas opens up a wider range of meanings. Setting animals within the financial district, the painting’s cityscape visualizes the intertwining of finance and development in late nineteenth-century New York. After the Civil War, banks and brokerage houses channeled capital into local real estate (including around Wall Street), spurring the rise of a powerful economy centered on Manhattan land. Beard’s painting spoofs booster narratives of urban progress and visualizes the chaos of New York’s land boom.
