The Long Bill

James Henry Beard arrived in Cincinnati around 1830, and for many years was the most esteemed portrait painter in the city. He soon joined a national movement in which artists, influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings, depicted subjects from everyday American life with vivid narrative content and naturalistically rendered details. Such works enjoyed broad appeal with the growing middle class and responded to the prevailing nationalism of the era. After the Civil War, Beard moved permanently to New York City, where he specialized in painting animals in human situations to satirize contemporary society.

"The Long Bill," painted in Cincinnati in 1840, uses humor to depict the encounter between an unsophisticated customer distraught by the high cost of groceries and the disdainful shopkeeper who bears the bad news. This subject would have had special meaning in 1840, when rampant inflation was the central issue of the presidential campaign. In this regard, "The Long Bill" functions as a political allegory. The customer may represent Ohioan William Henry Harrison, whom Beard ardently supported, and the shopkeeper his opponent, New Yorker Martin Van Buren, whom the press pegged as a dandy. In the "Cincinnati Gazette" for January 18, 1840, an admirer of the picture remarked, “The whole scene is very amusing, and painted with uncommon finish and accuracy. It is the best of Beard’s we have seen, and would be highly valued by any amateur of painting in the world.”