Hot off the Press!

The New York Times, winner of eighty-one Pulitzer Prizes, published its first edition 150 years ago today.

More than a million people now subscribe to this venerated broadsheet.

Before modern delivery services and coin boxes, children hustled newspapers on city streets. These youths often came from impoverished backgrounds, but some newsboys went on to become journalists.

Edward Mitchell Bannister's 1868 painting evokes a sense of early news circulation.

Newspaper Boy is one of Bannister's few surviving genre subjects and, unlike the country folk who unobtrusively appear in his later landscapes, the boy may be his only urban genre character. Bannister was generally uncomfortable with figure painting; here, the boy's hand, awkwardly stuffed in his pocket, contrasts with the sensitive handling of his expression.

Source: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

Pictured: Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828 Canada–1901 USA, Newspaper Boy, 1869, oil, 30 1/8 x 25 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Jack Hafif and Frederick Weingeroff.