Bread and Cheese Club

Bread and Cheese Club, social and cultural conclave created by author James Fenimore Cooper, which held meetings at Washington Hall, on the southeast corner of Broadway and Reade streets in New York City, from its formal beginning in 1824 until at least 1827. Its membership consisted of American writers, editors, and artists, as well as scholars, educators, art patrons, merchants, lawyers, politicians, and other professionals who dabbled in the arts.

The club was an outgrowth of “Cooper’s Lunch,” an impromptu gathering of Cooper’s network of intellectual friends, which first met in 1822 in the back room (“the Literary Den”) of a bookstore owned by Charles Wiley, who had made Cooper a national celebrity when he published Cooper’s second novel, The Spy, in 1821. The meetings of the Bread and Cheese Club were generally held fortnightly on Thursday afternoons and ended in the evening after dinner. The meal was usually cooked by Abigail Jones, an African American artist, with food supplied by members, who hosted or catered individual meetings in rotation. The chief shared aim of their forum was the enhancement of America’s cultural independence. The club’s name was derived from the unusual ballots used to elect new members: bread for acceptance, cheese for rejection.

The club’s membership consisted of about 35 individuals, including Wiley, painters Thomas Cole, William Dunlap, Asher B. Durand, Henry Inman, and John Wesley Jarvis; painter and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse; poets and writers William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck, J.A. Hillhouse, Washington Irving, James Kirke Paulding, J.G. Percival, and Robert Charles Sands; writer and editor Gulian C. Verplanck; editor and educator Charles King; naturalist James Ellsworth De Kay; physician John Wakefield Francis; jurist James Kent; and merchant Philip Hone. In 1824 Irving, who was living abroad, was made the honorary chairman in absentia. That same year the marquis de Lafayette, during his historic visit to the United States, was greeted by the Bread and Cheese Club. Although the club dissolved soon after Cooper moved away from New York City in 1826, some of its members branched off to form the Sketch and Literary clubs.