Object Type: Painting

Medium and Support: oil on panel

Credit Line: Florence Griswold Museum; Bequest of Arthur J. Phelan, Jr.

Accession Number: 2017.1.13

Realistic painting of a dollar bill against a black background. The money pictured is a "Series 1880 $1 Legal Tender", a type of currency first produced to meet demand for money during the Civil War. George Washington’s likeness, based on a portrait by Gilbert Stuart, appears at the center of the bill, and to the left, we see a vignette from William Henry Powell’s "Columbus in Sight of Land," an image that was later used on postage stamps. The bill has been signed by Blanche K. Bruce, Register of the Treasury, who had been the first Black person and only formerly enslaved person to have served in the US Senate. The bill's other signatory is Secretary of the Treasury A.U. Wyman. The two men served in office together between 1883 and 1885.

Thomas Hope, an English immigrant artist who spent much of his career in Connecticut, painted still lifes of fruit, flowers, decorative objects, and newspapers, but this is his own known depiction of money.