Seymour Joseph Guy (1824-1910)
Oil on canvas, 1903
Gift of the Partnership for New York City, Inc.
NYSM 2003.41.64

Never as powerful as Jay Gould or J. P. Morgan, banker and financier John Stewart Kennedy nevertheless played an important role in the economy of post-Civil War America. During the 1870s and 1880s, Kennedy helped arrange financing for components of what would become James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway, the transportation empire that helped open the country to development, from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. Born in Scotland, Kennedy moved to New York City in the 1850s. He established the banking house of J. S. Kennedy and Co., cultivating and maintaining a financial network in Europe and America throughout his career. A noted philanthropist, at his death Kennedy left thirty million dollars to various New York charities.

English-born Seymour Guy’s portrait d’apparat places the Kennedy within the context of his role as financier, dressed in an expensive suit of clothes and seated in a carved chair at a table laden with documents. Guy is best known for his narrative genre paintings, whose sentimental domesticity appealed to a broad range of genteel Victorian tastes.