Picturing Power

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THE CAPITALIST PO

paul staiti


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138 T H E C A P I T A

Chambers por

what were the

ture, caricature

Ideology


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Hancock, raise

Faneuil Hall, of

tribution to the

in King George

Halls portrait

to include John

cock, both of w

d l t


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figure 79

Charles Burton, Governors Room,

City Hall, ca. 1830. Watercolor,21116 3 in. (Collection of the

New-York Historical Society)


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Jurists, Author s, etc . (1862), and Benson Lossi

of the Signers (1848), Our Countrymen (1855),

Merchants and businessmen, however

early galleries and compendiums of worthi

Laurens, Nicholas Biddle, and Stephen Gir

they stood for their contributions to public

Longacre, and Herring was not thought to

J ff t f t th t h


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trade journal, w

with portrait en

(figure 81), and

merces early e

it publicly artic

In a preface jus

and the Painter

J ti d C


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in the Chambers membership, turning th

brig ands, and devour ing leviatha ns. A chro

(figure 84), shows a group of well-dressed c

Will iam H. Vanderbilt a nd Cy rus W. Field, b

lic sale run by an auctioneer who looks like U

In addition to caustic caricaturists, dis

fiction reprehensible business characters w

k d d d 23 At th t f th


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Even the ever-o

depravity of th

posed, but in fin

theme was not j

ment of the mo

acts, both perso

Almost all o

h


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the obvious diff

a businessman

intellectual acc

Peales Philade

self-congratula

an outside jur

collections of p

i th d


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Great because they were known chiefly fo

secondarily for good works. As such, their li

attributed to the eighteenth-century mod

enshrined them in a Great Man format, wh

on an artistic convention, but also an ackno

late-nineteenth-century America had now b

interest, and was no longer a paragon of virt

th id f th Ch b t it ll


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theywere entre

gallery of portr

than with the n

tations and wis

image.33 In tha

in the eighteen

such as Joshua

f ff t t


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small private collections or hung in the offi c

Chambers collection was self-consciously

displayed at its headquarters in the geogra

Chambers monumental Great Hall stood o

pantheon of a profession in the nations hist


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Thomas P. Rossiter,

1865. Oil on ca

(Richard H. Jenr

Henry Stanley Todd,

1899. Oil on c


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figure 90

Charles Loring Elliott,James De Peyster

Ogden, 1855. Oil on canvas, 36 29 in.

(Credit Suisse, New York)


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The majority

depict men em

the person porlife. Eastman J

Chamber from

eldest son of th

man in Americ

bl k (fi 93


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with McGuff ey s Reade rlengthened to inc

severance, and initiative.44 Max Weber, w

Spirit of Capitalism in 1904, at the apex of to explain that alliance between values of r

form of a grand theory. He identified ascet

the calculus of success, but its preconditio

saving, which had once been Calvinist val

l i d i t t f h t i th


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vidua l fortu ne were necessarily yoked to

continue, Carnegie predicted, but the m

the poor.50 Although the deadly conflicts bquarter of the nineteenth century would se

ceit that they were essentially beneficent, th

intense hold on the business imagination, in

of millions of dollars to libraries, schools,

i f d B t th l f i i t


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or Francis Lathrops Whitmanesque Collis

with tired, poignant eyes averted in reverie

charisma, none of what has been called ththat era.61 The Chambers anti-charismatic

picion of the Napoleonic metaphor, and a

of outward modesty and respectability. Ye

leaders of America. Writing about econom

i 1904 M W b th i d th t th h


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figure 10 2

Daniel Huntington, Richard Lathers,

1869. Oil on canvas, 50 40 in.

(Credit Suisse, New York)


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divested of refe

largesse, public

itself was politiently, and, visu

ber f rom t he sem

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