Horse Trade Scene, Cornish Maine 1853

In the months before his death, Bullard completed a painting that vividly illustrates his panorama's idiosyncratic way of witnessing and containing the spectacle of urban life. "Horse Trade Scene, Cornish Maine" (fig. 5) centers on a rural horse trader who has presumably just completed a transaction with a departing gentleman. In the background, through the open side door of a tavern, the viewer can just make out a broadside advertising "Bullard's panorama of New York City," to appear "this day" at a local hall. The painting depicts the kind of face- to-face economic transaction that would increasingly distinguish small-town American life from the complex financial transactions and speculations of urban capitalism. Of course, as the inclusion of the panorama broadside suggests, this small- town integrity was essentially counter-urban, depending as it did upon the distant-but-visible city for its own articulation. Bullard's panorama promised its audiences precisely what it brings to "Horse Trade Scene": a portable city framed, as it is in Bullard's late painting, by the rhetoric of honest exchange and unpretentious realism.

–Peter West The City in Frames - Otis Bullard's Moving Panorama of New York.