About this work
The first thing the eye lands on is gold — the entire facade of the New York Stock Exchange bathed in it, its Corinthian columns supporting a grand pediment, a theatrical curtain drawn back to reveal a medallion portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt at the composition's center.
Above him on the pediment, Stettheimer placed labeled portraits of Bernard Baruch, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan — Roosevelt's financial allies credited with wrestling the economy out of the Depression's grip.
Flags flank the Roosevelt medallion, and a length of red, white, and blue ticker-tape runs beneath his portrait.
Behind the pediment, the New York Harbor opens to the Statue of Liberty, while the gray stone tower of Trinity Church rises alongside the Exchange — exactly as it stands at the real intersection of Wall Street and Broadway.
A marching band and color guards move through the street; to their right, an affluent couple, Army and Navy officers, and a Native American chief fill out the scene.
Perhaps as a moral counterweight, Stettheimer tucks in a group of Salvation Army workers — a quiet warning against the temptations of earthly power.
In the lower right, a charming self-portrait shows Stettheimer in a red dress and red stilettos, holding a large bouquet trailing a ribbon inscribed "To George Washington from Florine Stettheimer, 1939" — and though she was nearly seventy, she depicted herself as a young woman.
The painting was inspired by a specific day: April 30, 1939, when New York simultaneously celebrated the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration on the steps of the Subtreasury Building and opened the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows — and Stettheimer, ever the stickler for accuracy, sent her lawyer to collect actual ticker-tape from the parade.
A committed supporter of New Deal programs including Social Security and unemployment insurance, Stettheimer gave Roosevelt his prominent, nearly sacred position in the composition deliberately.
The painting is the third of four monumental works — executed between 1929 and 1942 — in which Stettheimer created composite visions of New York's defining economic, social, and cultural institutions.
By uniting public figures with the era's major financial establishments, the work makes the entanglement of politics and big business not just visible but unavoidable.
In recent decades, historians have underscored the satirical, socially coded messages embedded in her faux-naïf style — and *Cathedrals of Wall Street* is among the most politically legible canvases she ever made.
