Speculative Landscapes

American Art and Real Estate in the Nineteenth Century

Ross Barrett

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780520343917
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520975248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Speculative Landscapes offers the first comprehensive account of American artists' financial involvements in and creative responses to the nineteenth-century real estate economy. Examining the dealings of five painters who participated actively in this economy—Daniel Huntington, John Quidor, Eastman Johnson, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer—Ross Barrett argues that the experience of property investment exposed artists to new ways of seeing and representing land, inspiring them to develop innovative figural, landscape, and marine paintings that radically reworked visual conventions. This approach moved beyond just aesthetics, however, and the book traces how artists creatively interrogated the economic, environmental, and cultural dynamics of American real estate capitalism. In doing so, Speculative Landscape s reveals how the provocative experience of land investment spurred painters to produce uniquely insightful critiques of the emerging real estate economy, critiques that uncovered its fiscal perils and social costs and imagined spaces outside the regime of private property.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Land, Looking, and Futurity in the Hudson Valley /
• 2. Digging for Gold: Allegories of Speculation on the Illinois Frontier /
• 3. Picturing Land and Labor in the Old Northwest and New England /
• 4. Perilous Prospects: Speculation and Landscape Painting in Florida /
• 5. Painting and Property on Prouts Neck /
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Illustrations
• Index