The South Sea Bubble, a Scene in 'Change Alley in 1720 is an 1847 history painting by the British artist Edward Matthew Ward.

[1] It depicts a scene in Exchange Alley in the City of London when the South Sea Bubble was at its height in 1720 shortly before its dramatic collapse.

It was a centre of financial speculation and Ward depicts it in a Hogarthian manner.

[2] Ward had been one of the members of The Clique, a group of artists including William Powell Frith, John Phillip and Henry Nelson O'Neil.

Although it was painted more than a century after the evens of the South Sea Bubble, it came shortly after the Railway Mania of the 1840s.