Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture
Speculative Landscapes: American Art and Real Estate in the Nineteenth Century
This fall I will be working on my book, Speculative Landscapes: American Art and Real Estate in the Nineteenth Century, which 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 in that economy—Daniel Huntington, John Quidor, Eastman Johnson, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer—the book shows that the practice of land investment inspired artists to compose innovative land- and seascapes that contended creatively with the financial abstractions, promotional fictions, and environmental forces of the land market. Shaping complicated accounts of soil and sea that explore the fiscal perils and social costs of speculative enterprise, these works shed new light on painting’s capacity to interrogate American real estate capitalism.