Bulls and Bears in the Stock Market (W.H. Beard) Playing Cards

This design features a painting by the American artist William Holbrook Beard (1824–1900). It is an allegorical image, showing bears and bulls running through the streets of New York, next to the stock exchange on Wall Street. The animals are used to symbolize the terms "bear market", where most share prices are falling, and a "bull market", where most share prices are rising. Investors can also be said to be "bearish" or "bullish", depending on their attitude and approach to investing: "bulls" would try to buy stocks cheap hoping for future growth, whereas "bears" would sell stocks hoping that the prices would drop in future. Some art critics have said that Beard may have been partly inspired in this work by the stock market crash of 1873, which resulted in the worst depression in nineteenth-century America.