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. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
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
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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