Available From UC Press

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 Landscapes 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.


 

Ross Barrett is Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. He is the author of Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art and the coeditor, with Daniel Worden, of Oil Culture.  

“Tracing the rise of the modern real estate economy through art’s entanglements with processes of speculation, gentrification, and various forms of land management between 1820 and 1900, Speculative Landscapes makes a compelling case for painting as a key site where those processes were worked out and, in some cases, resisted. Ross Barrett’s case studies reject any opposition between art and business to argue for both as ‘deeply imaginative’ endeavors.”—Jennifer A. Greenhill, author of Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age
 
“Speculative Landscapes is a comprehensive look at speculation, enclosure, outlay, debt, recompense, and the process by which land becomes property. Barrett shows how painting provided a tool for comprehending and commenting on that act of becoming.”—Leo Mazow, Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts