Trinity Church and Wall Street
Brooklyn Museum photograph
Object Label
Skyscrapers loom above older buildings, planes fly overhead, and people crowd the sidewalks in this dramatic bird’seye view of Manhattan’s Wall Street. Bertram Hartman’s meaning may not be quite so straightforward, however. He painted Trinity Church and Wall Street in the year of a great stock market crash that devastated the nation’s economy. By showing the gothic spires of Trinity Church overshadowed by skyscrapers, Hartman may have intended his viewers to contemplate the relationship between spiritual and material needs in modern life.
Caption
Bertram Hartman American, 1882–1960. Trinity Church and Wall Street, 1929. Oil on canvas, 50 x 30in. (127 x 76.2cm) frame: 55 1/2 x 35 1/2 x 2 in. (141 x 90.2 x 5.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, John B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 30.1109. No known copyright restrictions (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 30.1109_PS1.jpg)
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Artist
Title
Trinity Church and Wall Street
Date
1929
Medium
Oil on canvas
Classification
Dimensions
50 x 30in. (127 x 76.2cm) frame: 55 1/2 x 35 1/2 x 2 in. (141 x 90.2 x 5.1 cm)
Credit Line
John B. Woodward Memorial Fund
Accession Number
30.1109
Rights
No known copyright restrictions
This work may be in the public domain in the United States. Works created by United States and non-United States nationals published prior to 1923 are in the public domain, subject to the terms of any applicable treaty or agreement. You may download and use Brooklyn Museum images of this work. Please include caption information from this page and credit the Brooklyn Museum. If you need a high resolution file, please fill out our online application form (charges apply). The Museum does not warrant that the use of this work will not infringe on the rights of third parties, such as artists or artists' heirs holding the rights to the work. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions before copying, transmitting, or making other use of protected items beyond that allowed by "fair use," as such term is understood under the United States Copyright Act. The Brooklyn Museum makes no representations or warranties with respect to the application or terms of any international agreement governing copyright protection in the United States for works created by foreign nationals. For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org.
Frequent Art Questions
I am wondering if you can tell me a little about this artist. What was his background? Did he have any known political or spiritual beliefs?
Bertram Hartman was an American painter who was born in Kansas and studied in Chicago, Munich and Paris. He spent much of his career in New York. His work is now held in many collections around the world, including Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney. I'm sorry, though, my colleagues and I don't know anything about his religion.Many artists in the 1920s liked to paint this particular scene because it included different types of architecture that reminded them how New York City was changing at the time.It definitely shows the friction between old New York and new New York, in architectural terms -- the older Trinity Church and the newer skyscrapers with their "stepped" upper levels. He also painted the Brooklyn Bridge, a famous architectural symbol of modernity!
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