Charles Tracy Barney (1850–1907)

Charles Tracy Barney was a prominent New York banker and financier, later president of the Knickerbocker Trust Company. Zorn's 1904 portrait, now in the New York Historical Society, captures him at the height of his financial influence, three years before the Panic of 1907 would destroy the Knickerbocker Trust and ruin Barney personally. Viewed in retrospect, this portrait becomes a document of gilded-age financial power at its apex, painted by the most fashionable European portraitist of the American upper class at a moment when no catastrophe was visible on the horizon.

The formal portrait of a banker of Barney's prominence required Zorn to navigate the genre's conventions — formal dress, composed bearing, projecting solidity and trustworthiness — while retaining the painterly freshness that distinguished his work from more academic competitors of the period.